AVANT, Special Issue, Vol. IV, No. 3/2013 www.avant.edu.pl/en 
 

67 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



AVANT, Special Issue, Vol. IV, No. 3/2013 www.avant.edu.pl/en 
 

69 
 

 AVANT, Vol. IV, No. 3/2013 
ISSN: 2082-6710 avant.edu.pl/en 

DOI: 10.12849/40302013.1012.0002 

 

"They Never Dance":  
The Choreography of Le Sacre du Printemps, 1913 

Hanna Järvinen 
Performing Arts Research Centre  
Theatre Academy  
The University of the Arts, Helsinki 
gekko[]iki.fi 
Received 11 November 2013; accepted 30 December 2013; published Winter 2013/2014. 

Abstract 

In this text, I discuss Vaslav Nijinsky's choreography of Le Sacre du Printemps 
(henceforth Sacre) as it appears in the light of primary source materials from 
1913. By focusing on the unique challenges Nijinsky posed to his dancers in 
terms of movement style and composition, I contest many of the frequently-
heard claims made about this work, particularly its danced component, and 
argue that Nijinsky's choreographic ideas challenged both dancers and critics 
by questioning the ontological qualities of (art) dance in contemporary 
discourse. 

Keywords: Le Sacre du Printemps; Nijinsky; Stravinsky; choreography; dance. 

Some Premises for the Analysis 

The fact of the matter is that there has been far too much talk about 
theories and too little knowledge of the art of dancing. We talk of 
dancing in terms of painting, music, and even literature, instead of in 
terms of dancing. Nijinsky is endeavouring to evolve a new school of 
pantomime. That is quite enough. Let us try to take it on its merits and 
understand what it seeks to express. (The Nation 2.8.1913.) 

The critic of The Nation could be speaking about the current research on the 
work he describes. Although much has been said of the 1913 premiere of 
Sacre, not many authors have focused on the actual bodies performing on 
stage. While the musical score has been canonised as a masterpiece, the 
choreography was only performed nine times35 before it was withdrawn from 
the repertory of the company, leaving only scattered remains of critical 
reception and reminiscences in the archive. In dance, where notation is not 

                                                             
35 There were six performances (as well as a public dress-rehearsal) in Paris, three performances 
in London. 

 



A Laboratory of Spring 
 

70 
 

standard practice, 'works' are understood as a living tradition, transmitted 
from one professional or a group of professionals to the next. This embodied 
practice is, to use Diana Taylor's (2003: esp. 16-52) term, the repertoire, an 
ephemeral social practice that can be contrasted with the fixed, hegemonic 
documents in the archive. In my Foucauldian reiteration of Taylor's 
argument, the repertoire becomes a re-enacted, constantly changing 
reiteration of the past in the present. It is embedded in complex interactions 
with the archive to which we can return but which also always-already limits 
what we can claim to know about past performances. Thus, the disappearance 
of a particular work from the active repertory (of all dance companies) does 
not entail an actual loss of that work as much as its transformation on the 
level of archive/repertoire. In a sense, the 1913 Sacre figures prominently in 
both the archive and the repertoire, even if the specific choreography has not 
been performed since 1913. 

However, this epistemological uncertainty of dance − simultaneously 
ephemeral and static, changing and fixed into a canon of masterworks − is an 
issue particularly pertinent to the 1913 Sacre. In 1987, the work was 
'reconstructed' by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer who collected 
selected parts of the archive, forcing them together into a new saleable 
product for the repertory. In the academe, this kind of re-making raised more 
questions about the processes of "archiving" repertoire and the epistemology 
of performance,36 rather than provoked a critical discussion on how exactly 
this kind of reconstruction fixes the past by stabilising it both 
epistemologically and ontologically. That is how a large-scale (i.e. very 
expensive) reconstruction ends up becoming a new original and becoming an 
archive, suppressing the need to do critical research on a past work, research 
that is crucial to understanding the significance of the past in the present. 
Today, when dance audiences (including many researchers) think of 
"Nijinsky's Sacre" they actually think of Millicent Hodson's choreography, and 
they see this choreography as (relatively) unchanging and stable.37 This 
means that even dance researchers disregard the huge potential for 
reimagining dance in 1913 − and in 2013 − still in the archive. 

 

                                                             
36 See e.g. Acocella 1991; and Fink 1999: esp. 305-312. On the problems with notions like 
’authentic’ and ’original’ in dance, see Burt 1998; and Carter 1998.  

37 As in Hoogen 1997: esp. 49-53; Jordan 2000: 39-42; Launay 2003; Solomon 2011: esp. 76-77. In 
other words, despite their awareness of reconstruction as an imagined original, dance scholars 
tend to assert the hegemony of Hodson's interpretation in their actual analyses referencing her 
work as Nijinsky and taking what is shown on stage now as having also been there in 1913. What 
they miss is how Hodson (1985) builds elaborate arguments about choreography on select, mostly 
secondary sources, often relying on pure speculation that is obscured in the staged spectacle and 
by her numerous publications. 



AVANT, Special Issue, Vol. IV, No. 3/2013 www.avant.edu.pl/en 
 

71 
 

Despite its magnificent costumes and sets, a key issue with the so-called 
reconstruction of Sacre is that a source which describes movement does not 
necessarily describe choreography, understood as the spatial and temporal 
arrangement of movements and stillnesses, gestures and steps, rhythms and 
paces of a body or a group of bodies. Neither movement nor choreography 
require musical accompaniment, as these may not necessarily be 'dance' 
(Lepecki 2006: especially 1-2). In this article, 'choreography' is used in the 
specific sense of a composition of staged art dance, that is an aesthetic practice 
with a history and a canon of authors and masterworks, a practice with self-
consistent form and temporally and geographically specific conventions 
acquired through education and practice. One of my points is that the limits of 
what is understood as 'dance' and how 'dancing' is defined vary; hence, any 
definitions of what is or is not dance at a given time contain value-
judgements, often made in order to exclude certain movement practices from 
the definition of 'dance' (as with ragtime dances, see Järvinen 2012). 

Indeed, one of the most intriguing aspects of the critical reception of Nijinsky's 
choreographic work is the frequency of this exclusion: 

Il n’y a pas, dans tout le Sacre du printemps, une seule ligne, un seul 
mouvement d’un seul personnage qui ait une apparence de grâce, 
d’élégance, de légèreté, de noblesse, de l’éloquence et d’expression: tout 
est laid, lourdement, platement et uniformément laid. Danseurs et 
danseuses, presque toujours serrés en groups épais et compacts, 
demeurent tassés sur eux-mêmes, ne faisant que des gestes maladroits, 
raccourcis, rétrécis, étriqués, des gestes d’infirmes et d’ataxiques. Ils 
agitent leurs bras comme des moignons, et leurs jambes comme si elles 
étaient en bois. Ils ne dansent jamais: ils ne font que tressauter, 
trépigner, piétiner et trembloter convulsivement sur place; et lorsqu’ils 
ont commencé de faire un mouvement quelconque, ils le répètent 
indéfiniment, jusqu’à la satiété, jusqu’à l’ennui, jusqu’à l’agacement, 
jusqu’à l’irritation. (Pierre Lalo in Le Temps 3.6.1913.) 

Here, Pierre Lalo, the son of the composer Eduard Lalo, not only lists qualities 
expected of the kind of dance that claims to be art − "grace, elegance, 
lightness, nobility, eloquence, and expression" − but also describes the 
aesthetic qualities of Sacre − "ugly" − and even some aspects of Nijinsky's 
choreography − compact groups, repetition of movements, remaining in place 
− as 'not dancing'. This shows how our understanding of movement, including 
staged movement, is embedded in assumptions about aesthetic evaluations of 
beauty and ugliness as well as in codes of appropriateness (propriety and 
decency), political anxieties about encountering the other (particularly en 
masse), the historical specificity of bodies, affects and cultural signs. In short, 
it refers to what Reinhardt Koselleck (2004: 255-275) has called "the horizon of 
expectations" at a given time and place. For the Parisian audiences of 29 May 



A Laboratory of Spring 
 

72 
 

1913, this horizon of expectations also included (if reminiscences are to be 
believed) violent protests at the company's audacity of presenting this thing as 
dance. 

Although Lalo is repeating a view about dance (graceful, harmonious 
movement) hegemonic amongst contemporary dance aficionados,38 his 
indignation actually shows the novelty and importance of the kind of 
choreography he criticised. But Lalo, like so many people who have discussed 
Sacre since, never pauses to think why a Russian dancer known as a virtuoso 
in precisely this kind of graceful movement and lauded as a genius of his art 
form, would be interested in this kind of movement language or these kinds of 
choreographic devices. Moreover, he does not consider how a dancer, 
accustomed to the same hegemonic view about what they should be doing on 
stage, might react to the choreographer's demands. 

 

Primitivism in the Russian Context 

In contemporary reviews, the most common justification for the movement 
qualities that Lalo lists − for better or worse − was that Nijinsky was 
representing primitive humans (e.g. Boschot in L’Echo de Paris quoted in 
Bullard 1971(ii): 12; Lunacharsky in Teatr i iskusstvo 9./22.6.1913). Leaving 
aside ridiculous claims about Nijinsky and his collaborators recreating a 
primitive ritual,39 the question of the primitive clearly did not arise solely 
from the theme of the ballet, pagan Russia, but rather from the Western 
perspective on Russia as a primitive nation and on dance as a primitive 
practice.40 The prevalence of this discourse is still evident in the research on 
Sacre. 

                                                             
38 See e.g. André Suarès in La Nouvelle revue française 1.8.1912; Crawford Flitch 1912: 24 on dance 
as joy; or how Johnson 1913: 186 and The Dancing Times August 1913 represent Nijinsky's L'Après-
midi d'Faune (1912) as unnecessarily restricting dancers to a seemingly two-dimensional stage 
picture. Later, this kind of dance, "diametrically opposed to his potentialities and natural gifts" 
(Sert 1953: 125-126) has been represented as indicative of mental illness, because Nijinsky was 
institutionalised as insane in 1919. 
39 As in Hodson 1985 and 1985b; and Hoogen 1997. These interpretations rest on a theoretical 
tradition associating dance with primitive rituals that has been repeatedly and thoroughly dis-
credited in dance anthropology − see Buckland 2001/2002: 415. Specifically, they owe much to the 
set designer of Sacre, Nicholas Roerich − in particular his interview in Rech 22.11./5.12.1912. Alt-
hough both Stravinsky and Nijinsky seem to have respected Roerich as an authority on pagan 
Russia, Nijinsky specifically requested that he not be present at the rehearsals. Diaghilev to Stra-
vinsky 20.12.1912/2.1.1913 in Stravinsky 1997(i): 398. 
40 See below on the Ballets Russes according to Jacques Rivière, who was merely following a trend 
in the reviews where the Russians were regularly discussed as the guardians of mystical 
memories of primitive ancestors (to cite Le Figaro 27 May 1909) and "the virile impulses of an 
untamed race" (Johnson 1913: 161). On dance as the primitive origin of art, see e.g. St.-Johnston 
1906: 10-3; Flitch 1912: 15-9; Caffin & Caffin 1912: 21-5. 



AVANT, Special Issue, Vol. IV, No. 3/2013 www.avant.edu.pl/en 
 

73 
 

With Sacre, the generally positive tone of Russian reviews is also in stark 
contrast to the generally negative Russian view of Diaghilev's enterprise and 
the mixed opinion of Western critics (Järvinen 2013). For example, the future 
Commissar of Enlightenment in the Soviet Union, Anatoly Lunacharsky (in 
Teatr i iskusstvo 9./22.6.1913), discussed how this work overhauled traditional 
notions of beauty in ballet and, like the former Director of the Imperial 
Theatres, Prince Sergei Volkonsky (in Apollon 6/1913), emphasised that Sacre 
did not aim for archaeological accuracy or ethnographic authenticity in its 
representation of the primitive.41 Although it never occurred to Lunacharsky 
that Nijinsky would have viewed primitive form (as well as primitivist 
developments in contemporary art) as beautiful in and of itself, he at least did 
not mistake Russians for primitives in the manner of many of the French 
critics praised in research as truly understanding Sacre.42 As an example of 
the latter, in his first article on Sacre for La Nouvelle revue française (August 
1913), Jacques Rivière claimed that the Russians had a kind of a primitive hive 
mind and he explicitly rested his appraisal of the new work on this presumed 
racial, that is, biological difference: 

Cette petite troupe d’hommes n’a pas été entamée. [--] Entre eux et nous 
il y a la distance d’une race à une autre. [--] S’il leur est impossible de 
communiquer avec nous, lorsqu’ils sont entre eux, ils ont une 
extraordinaire faculté de mêler leurs âmes, de sentir et de penser la 
même chose à plusieurs. Leur race est trop jeune encore pour que se 
soient construites en chaque être ces milles petites différences, ces 
délicates réserves personnelles, ces légères mais infranchissables 
défenses qui abritent le seuil d’un esprit cultivé. L’originalité n’est pas en 
eux cette balance fragile de sentiments hétérogènes qu’elle est en nous. 
Elle a quelque chose de plus libre, de plus rude, de moins facile à 
endommager. C’est pourquoi elle peut s’engager et se perdre un instant 
dans les autres. 

The fact that Rivière explicitly rests his praise of the new work on the inherent 
and irrevocable difference between the "untamed" Russians and the 
"cultivated" French is why it is so suspect that in his famous second article in 

                                                             
41 Both quoted in Järvinen 2013. Both critics also disliked Roerich's costumes: the former thought 
them unoriginal and the latter called them "губернія" (provincial). In contrast, the usual advocate 
of Diaghilev's enterprise, Valerian Svetlov (in Peterburgskaia gazeta 23.5./5.6.1913) focused on 
Roerich's contribution, apparently because Nijinsky's choreography made him very 
uncomfortable. 

42 Such as Rivière - see e.g. Kirstein 1975: 144, 164-168; Garafola 1992: 69-70; Launay 2003. What 
truly indicates the remarkable Orientalism of research on the Ballets Russes is that familiarity 
with Russian materials or ability to read Russian are not deemed necessary for expertise on the 
company. Russian reviews are also conspicuously absent from the reconstruction materials 
Hodson uses. 



A Laboratory of Spring 
 

74 
 

La Nouvelle revue française (November 1913), he speaks of Sacre as a 
"biological" ballet. Indeed, this blatant racism of contemporary discourse, 
where race was a natural category, is rarely addressed in research on the 
Ballets Russes. 

Primitivism − seeking aesthetic ideas in the products of contemporary 
cultures perceived as incapable of progress, eternally representing the past of 
humankind − certainly affected the choreographic ideas of Nijinsky who was 
commissioned to translate the libretto of the new ballet into a misé-en-scène. 
Although no notation of Sacre by Nijinsky has survived,43 Nijinsky was highly 
interested in Cubism and even claimed that: "Моя новая формула движения 
подчеркнет механизм жеста и линий. Я применил к хореографии 
теорию живописцев-кубистов."44 Also the fact that his contemporaries 
immediately associated particular kinds of gestures with the primitive and the 
savage − for better or for worse − attests to a shared understanding of what 
'primitive' connoted in aesthetic terms.45 However, the significance of 
primitive differed greatly between the Parisian spectators, who feared that 
the demise of their empire was already visible in the degenerative effects of 
over-civilization, and the Russian audiences, for whom the primitive was 
imbued with ideas about neo-nationalist revival. 

The critics’ own views on the role of this neo-nationalism in Russian art 
greatly influenced how they interpreted what they saw of it in Sacre. 
Regardless of whether they liked Nijinsky's choreography, Russian critics 
were inclined to see a connection between the danced gestures and old native 
Russian forms of art, notably icons and lubki (popular prints); but they 
simultaneously stressed the interpretation of these forms in the dance was 
inherently modern.46 However, whereas both Lunacharsky and Volkonsky 
saw this modernism as a (more or less) positive tendency, Levinson clearly 
posited himself against the narodnik (Populist) tradition of neo-nationalism, 
where true Russianness stemmed from a connection to the soil and the 
                                                             
43 There are no hand-written notes to Stravinsky's piano score in the manner of Nijinsky's notes 
on Debussy's Jeux (Debussy & Nijinsky s.a.)  

44 "My new formula of movement emphasises the mechanism of gesture and line. I apply to 
choreography the theory of Cubist painters." Nijinsky quoted in Peterburgskaia gazeta 
15./28.4.1912 (quoted in Zilberstein & Samkov 1982(i): 448, my translation). His interview in 
Comœdia 18.4.1912 headlined "Nijinski va faire dans l”Après-midi d’un Faune’ des essais de 
chorégraphie cubiste". 

45 However, see Berliner 2002: 7 on the distinction between the 'sauvage' and the 'primitif'. 

46 See Lunacharsky in Teatr i iskusstvo 9./22.6.1913 on lubki and primitive painting; Levinson in 
Rech 3./16.6.1913 on "icon-painting-like gestures" and "naïve kustarnost" (kustari being peasant 
manufactures, kustarnost means their products); Volkonsky in Apollon 6/1913 on "cubist icon-
painting". All these stress the connection to painting (flatness, stylisation). More in Järvinen 2013: 
esp. 11-19. 



AVANT, Special Issue, Vol. IV, No. 3/2013 www.avant.edu.pl/en 
 

75 
 

(idealised) peasants.47 This observation not only points to the co-existence of 
different nationalisms in Russia and their significance to the critical reception 
of a work seemingly about Russia's past (and its future), but also suggests 
caution in assuming that any critic (particularly a foreign critic) understood 
the "truth" of Sacre. 

Although it is likely that the frequency of associating Nijinsky's 
choreographies with Cubism was due to the choreographer's published 
claims, it is also crucial to note that Russian and Western reviews differ in 
their reading of this Cubism. In the West, Nijinsky's stylisation − his 
choreographic focus on simple movements and idiomatic gestures − was 
usually deemed ugly, unsuited to dance as an art form, and, more specifically, 
a foreign tendency threatening the 'authenticity' of the Russians.48 In Russia, 
these formal qualities were seen as imbued with national spirit, making the 
work more Russian as well as engaging with contemporary concerns in 
Russian art. This is why it is crucial that Nikolai Minsky (pseudonym of 
Nikolai Maksimovich Vilenkin) labelled Nijinsky's choreographic style 'neo-
realism' − a word he used of the Acmeist49 poets. For Minsky, Nijinsky's 
choreographies were a stylised form of everyday reality, a new kind of 
formalism misunderstood for the same reason similar modernist ideas of 
beauty were misinterpreted in other art forms. In his review of Sacre for Utro 
Rossii 30.5./12.6.1913, Minsky distinguished this neo-realism from realism, the 
style favoured by the narodniki, emphasising that in the former, reality was 
but a starting point: the goal was artifice, as in all great art. Since Minsky also 
chides Mikhail Fokine, Nijinsky's predecessor as the principal ballet master of 

                                                             
47 Like most advocates of the 'old ballet' of Petipa, Levinson was politically aligned with the 
zapadniki (Westernisers), for whom Russians imported Western cultural products to improve 
them for the greater glory of the nation. See Mikkeli 1999: 149-155; Vihavainen 1999: 168-169; 
Williams 1999: 3-18, esp. 11. Ballet was one of these 'improved imports' associated with the 
Petrine reforms. In contrast, kustari were the domain of the narodniki (Populists) who sought the 
Russian soul in the folk traditions of the peasants. Many of the narodniki embraced primitivism, 
which utilised the crafts of peasants to create designs for the modern consumer. Salmond 1996; 
also Rhodes 1994: 24-31. As a socialist, Lunacharsky would have been closer to the narodniki 
whereas Volkonsky, a Baltic nobleman, is a more complex case. 

48 This is particularly true of the French reviews, e.g. Gaston Carraud in La Liberté 31.5.1913 
quoted below. Similar claims had already surfaced with Nijinsky's L'Après-midi d'un Faune of 
1912, and again with Jeux, also to Debussy's score, a fortnight before Sacre: see e.g. Camille 
Mauclair in Le Courrier Musical 15.6.1912. However, exceptions also exist: Octave Mauss L’Art 
Moderne quoted in Bullard 1971(ii): 72-76; and Jean Marnold in Mercure de France 1.10.1913, who 
shared Rivière's opinion of the Russian race as an atavistic collective. In England, where critics 
were less hostile towards Nijinsky's choreographies, some really made an effort to understand 
with Sacre - see Francis Toye in The Graphic 19.7.1913 (negative); cf. Toye in The Bystander 
23.7.1913 (positive). 

49 The Acmeists were a loose group of poets including Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam as 
well as Minsky himself. 



A Laboratory of Spring 
 

76 
 

the Ballets Russes, with the words of Tolstoy, his point is clearly a modernist 
re-appropriation of the Russian realist tradition. Nijinsky's later interest in 
Tolstoy makes this connection almost too neat to be credible.50 

In contrast, Western critics had a tendency to represent Nijinsky’s works as 
“une phase nouvelle de la lutte de l’idéalisme contre le réalisme dans l’art 
scénique” (Vuillermoz in S.I.M. Revue musicale June 1913), as a new kind of 
anti-realist art. However, Minsky's reading of Sacre is plausible because what 
he says is also close to Nijinsky’s (in Le Figaro 14.5.1913) insistence that dance 
should utilise contemporary movements: 

L’homme que je vois avant tout autre sur la scène, dit-il, c’est l’homme 
moderne. Je rêve d’un costume, d’une plastique, d’un mouvement qui 
seraient caractéristiques de notre temps. Il y a sûrement dans le corps 
humain des éléments qui sont significatifs de l’époque où il s’exprime. 
Lorsqu’on voit aujourd’hui un homme se promener, lire un journal ou 
danser le tango, on n’aperçoit rien de commun entre ses gestes et ceux, 
par exemple, d’un flâneur sous Louis XV, d’un gentilhomme courant le 
menuet, ou d’un moine lisant studieusement un manuscrit au treizième 
siècle. 

For Nijinsky, a man on the modern streets did not walk like a man from the 
seventeenth century, the dances of the 1910s were not minuets and a 
newspaper was not read reverentially. What is at stake, here, is more than 
period style, it is the aesthetic of grace and harmony: when movement is no 
longer something eternal, ideal or 'natural' in the manner of contemporary 
dance discourse, dance can no longer act as a 'cure' to modernity.51 Therefore, 
the role of the primitive in Sacre was to allow for experimentation with form, 
to find an excuse to do away with precisely those aesthetic qualities that were 
usually seen as ontological: grace, harmony, lightness, flow. For this reason, 
although meant as a joke, there is no actual contradiction in Alfred Capus (in a 
satirical front-page editorial to Le Figaro 2.6.1913) calling one of the 
characters "le type bien moderne de la femme de trois cents ans", a woman 
both modern and ancient. 

 

                                                             
50 During the war, Nijinsky began to plan a school of dancing. He drafted charters for the school, 
beginning each with quotations from Tolstoy - see Krasovskaya 1979: 326, 336. He also became a 
vegetarian, adopted Tolstoyan religious ideas and reinterpreted his life and career in his so-called 
Diary (Nijinsky 1999, written between 19.1.-4.3.1919 under the influence of psychoactive drugs 
administered by a sports doctor in love with Nijinsky's wife - see Ostwald 1991: esp. 174-175, 184), 
eerily similar at times to Tolstoy 1904. 

51 This relates to how, before the First World War, only certain kinds of dance were acceptable in 
the discourse. Ragtime dances or the tango that Nijinsky mentions were not; they were a 
"degenerate" form, the opposite of modern art dance (including ballet) in contemporary dance 
literature. See Järvinen 2012 for a discussion; also, first paragraph of the next section. 



AVANT, Special Issue, Vol. IV, No. 3/2013 www.avant.edu.pl/en 
 

77 
 

Simple Movements, Stylised Gestures 

What, then, were the specific movement qualities associated with Sacre? 
Based on the reviews, these could be labelled 1) pedestrian simplicity, 2) 
asymmetry, 3) repetition, 4) stillness, and 5) submission to gravity. As I noted 
in conjunction with Lalo's review, all these qualities were seen as refuting the 
ontological premises of art dance: in order to be art, dance was supposed to be 
graceful, harmonious, unique, flowing and light movement. In contemporary 
dance discourse, where the primitive was usually associated with ragtime 
dance (e.g. Caffin & Caffin 1912: esp. 255-279), introducing these qualities to a 
ballet about primitive Russians meant imitating the subject-matter too 
literally. Coming from Russians, moreover, it revealed the essential primitivity 
of the Russians themselves, their reversion to type.52 

Since Nijinsky left no notes on Sacre − it being the only one of his four 
choreographies he does not mention in his so-called Diary (Nijinsky 1999) – 
some aspects of the choreography can be inferred from what is known of 
these other works. Ann Hutchinson Guest's and Claudia Jeschke's 1987 
reconstruction of L'Après-midi d'un Faune (1912, henceforth Faune), based on 
Nijinsky's notation for this choreography, should serve as an example of how 
and why contemporary opinions on movement qualities in Nijinsky's 
choreographies should be taken with a grain of salt. Setting aside the 
problems of recreating performance from the archive, this reconstruction has 
shown how the qualities of jerkiness and angularity that contemporary critics 
and later reminiscences and reconstructions have ascribed to this work (and 
Nijinsky's choreographic aesthetic more generally) are contingent upon a 
hegemonic assumption of what dance should be rather than any intrinsic 
qualities of the choreography.53 For today's spectator, there is nothing stiff, 
constrained or unnatural about Faune, because we are accustomed to a 
different aesthetic. Similar responses of critics indicate that with the 
exception of the extraordinary dance of the Chosen Maiden in the second act 
of Sacre, there was little virtuosity in this work.54 

 

                                                             
52 See e.g. Jean Perros in La Critique Independante 15 June 1913; Victor Débay in Le Courrier 
Musical 15.6.1913. 
53 See Guest & Jeschke 1991: 1, 17-18; Gerhard 2000: 32-33; L’Après-midi d’un Faune 1991. 
Particularly because the reconstructors stress theirs is an interpretation of a score, this work also 
shows the critical potential of reconstruction as a practice, as discussed by Franko 1989, even if in 
actual performance practice, such conditioning is only evident in the programme booklets, not on 
stage. 
54 Or, rather, the virtuosity is of a different order: it does not lie in physical bravado but in 
rhythmic precision, a subdued virtuosity of the professional dancer. See e.g. Volkonsky quoted in 
note 66 below. 



A Laboratory of Spring 
 

78 
 

In 1912-1913, it was self-evident that natural movement on stage was always 
learned and cultivated movement striving for beauty and grace. In the words 
of Louis Laloy (in La Grande revue 25.5.1913), the purpose of dance was to 
create “combinaisons inédites, plus belles et plus vraies que celles du 
quotidien usage,” meaning that which was better than the real. The stage was 
an improved reality, so any staged expressions had to be aesthetically 
pleasing. As in contemporary theatre (Hatt 1999: 251-253; Brewster & Jacobs 
1997: esp. 93-96, 140-141), the imperfect, untrained and undisciplined body 
was offensive − in other words, on stage, 'natural' or 'realistic' movements did 
not aim at verisimilitude. Everyday movement (as in Jeux, Nijinsky's second 
choreography that Laloy here attacked) was not acceptable in dance that 
claimed to be art.55  

Apart from adherence to grace and harmony, training was imperative 
because only the cultivated ‘natural’ body expressed emotion directly and 
without ambivalence. Gestures were a universal language that, if executed 
correctly, conveyed the desired message and affect of dance.56 Nijinsky's 
predecessor as the principal ballet master of the Ballets Russes, Mikhail 
Fokine, thought awkwardness was always the result of poor training; hence, it 
was unnatural, ugly and suited only for sideshow material (Fokine 1961: esp. 
251-254; Nelson 1984: 8). Together with the critics' concern over grace and 
'plastique', these ideas greatly limited what was permissible on stage. It seems 
that Nijinsky was tired of these limits:57 Sacre utilised precisely these 
'unseemly' movement qualities to great effect. 

Early silent films may give us an idea what ‘natural’ gestures and mimicry 
meant for turn-of-the-century audiences – for historical reasons, we see these 
expressions as excessive, even histrionic.58 Ever since Faune, Nijinsky had 
been known for eliminating precisely this kind of acted expression: 

                                                             
55 These views were widespread amongst contemporary dancers as well: see Isadora Duncan 
quoted in Kinney & Kinney s.a.: 243; Duncan 1977: esp. 79. See also e.g. Koritz 1994: 70; Carter 
2011. 

56 See Mikhail Mordkin's description of how to correctly represent affects on stage in The Literary 
Digest 10.2.1912; or Isadora Duncan quoted in Flitch 1912: 107. 

57 See Nijinsky in The Daily Mail 14.7.1913; also, Lady Ottoline Morrell 1963: 227 reminisced that: 
“Such ballets as Le Spectre de la Rose did not interest him; he said it was trop joli and was rather 
annoyed when people admired it.” 

58 Of course, any stage gestures have to convey emotional impact even for members of the 
audience sitting at the back row. As Brewster and Jacobs (1997: esp. 81-108) have demonstrated, 
particular concerns of the cinematic stage space (especially the close-up shot and larger-than-life 
screens which heightened the visibility of the smallest detail) induced reduced gesturing also in 
theatre. This new cinematic acting style gradually became the standard by which we now 
evaluate staged gestures as 'natural'. 



AVANT, Special Issue, Vol. IV, No. 3/2013 www.avant.edu.pl/en 
 

79 
 

Once when a new girl had to learn Nijinsky’s sister’s part, in which the 
Nymph suddenly sees the Faune, turns away and walks off – he said to 
her: ‘Why do you look so frightened?’  

She said she thought she was meant to be. Thereupon, quite in a rage, he 
said that the movement he gave her was all that was required of her, he 
was not interested in her personal feelings.59 

Although Nijinsky's notation for Faune is impossible to execute,60 it provides 
at least some idea on what his first choreography looked like. Clearly, Nijinsky 
did not do away with mimicry as much as stylised and conventionalised it, 
replacing the acted-out expressivity of an individual dancer with 
choreographed expressivity, set for all dancers dancing a particular role. 
Thus, in Faune, the dancers' fingers indicate the character's emotional 
responses (the Faun's thumbs, for example, went up to indicate interest and 
arousal), no matter who danced this particular part. 

From the perspective of the dancers, only recently accustomed to the kind of 
theatrical acting Nijinsky opposed, the choreographer seemed to deprive them 
of precisely those qualities they would have associated with stardom 
(individuality and self-expression). In the 'new ballet',61 although the corps de 
ballet was still the scenery for the main action, it was common for ballet 
masters to give the dancers in the corps the freedom to improvise their 
particular tasks for crowd scenes.62 This not only broke the traditional 
uniformity of the corps, but also allowed greater liberties in interpretation for 
precisely the dancers traditionally deprived of such rights – a likely reason for 
Fokine’s great popularity amongst the Ballets Russes corps-de-ballet dancers. 

Nijinsky's choreographic practice of thinking over the smallest detail before 
rehearsing the work with the dancers deprived the dancers of the power to 
influence the end result to the extent to which they were accustomed. Hence, 
the dancers often referred to Nijinsky's choreography as ‘unnatural’ and 
‘constraining’; the choreography, they said, made them feel like they were 
made of wood or stone – as if they were materials shaped by the 

                                                             
59 Rambert 1983: 62. According to Marian Smith 2000: 35, 46-47, mime passages have been well-
nigh eliminated in today’s versions of nineteenth-century ballets. 
60 Guest & Jeschke 1991: especially 192-194 on compromises necessary for rehearsing the 
choreography from Nijinsky's notation, where Nijinsky “wrote the degree of bend and placement 
of each finger and thumb for holding the flute.” Guest 1992: 424. Also e.g. Rambert 1975; Rambert 
1983: 61-62 on Nijinsky’s extraordinary demands for precision. 
61 In Russia, 'new ballet' was an early-twentieth-century choreographic style emphasising 
dramatic acting associated with Aleksandr Gorsky and contrasted with the 'old ballet' of Petipa. 
See e.g. Järvinen 2013, 10. 
62 See e.g. Karsavina 1981: 287; Rambert 1983: 61, 78; Nijinska 1992: esp. 286, 466 on Fokine. At the 
time, no choreography was expected to remain the same from one performance to the next: see 
Petipa quoted in Wiley 1985: 2. 



A Laboratory of Spring 
 

80 
 

choreographer (Nijinska 1992: 428; Sokolova 1960: 40-41). This indicates the 
emergence of the idealist view of dance composition, where the choreography 
is an abstraction in the head of the singular, new author of dance, the 
choreographer; and where the dancer is an always-already imperfect 
executioner of the will of this author-figure (Monni 2007: 39-43). This idealist 
view is, of course, close to the manner in which music is understood in 
formalist musicology (e.g. McClary 1995), but it is important that it emerges 
with Nijinsky's authoritative statements about his choreographic 
compositions, made possible because of his celebrity status as a dancing 
genius.63 

Anonymous Asymmetrical Masses 

In dance, the concern with grace and harmony links these ideas of a 'natural' 
cultivated body language to asymetry, the second movement quality I 
mentioned. Lalo's description of the infirm gestures of the ataxic dancers 
indicates contorted or jerky movements, but as with other Nijinsky 
choreographies, these qualities have been exaggerated out of all proportion in 
later research. The "jerkiness" in Nijinsky's choreographies seems to have 
been the quality of everyday movement that contemporary dance discourse 
deemed unfit for the stage, an indication of how the modern world was 
desperately in need for a cure to modernity (see e.g. Flitch 1912: 103-104 
quoted in Järvinen 2009: 51). 

However, asymmetry relates not only to the asymmetry of gestures or the line 
of an individual dancer's body but to how dance was arranged on stage. There 
is some evidence that audiences, unaccustomed to intentional asymmetry and 
arrhythmia in choreography, interpreted their appearance in Nijinsky's 
choreographies as the dancers' "mistakes".64 In ballet choreography, the 
conventional manner of arranging dancers on stage was based on the 
principals. Fokine preferred diagonal and circular floor-patterns that 
emphasised the three-dimensionality of the stage and also skilfully utilised the 
corps de ballet to emphasise the principals.65 The effect shows in a review in 
The Lady (3.8.1911): 
                                                             
63 See Järvinen 2009: 54-55; e.g. Chantavoine in L'Excelsior 30.5.1913 made a distinction between 
Nijinsky as dancer and Nijinsky as choreographer to disparage the latter. 
64 For example, Pall Mall Gazette 18.2.1913. When Nijinsky re-rehearsed Faune for the second 
North American tour of the Ballets Russes in 1916, after the critics had seen a memory-based 
version of the work, The New York Herald 25.10.1916 wrote that "The chorus seemed to dance not 
quite so smoothly as last season, but, no doubt, it was because of a lack of time for rehearsals." In 
actuality, the reverse was true. 
65 Jeschke 1990: 103-104. However, Russian critics complained that Fokine had lost sight of 
choreography as composition, his staging was "real, not represented, disorder" according to 
Volkonsky in The Nineteenth Century and After June 1913; similarly, Levinson in Apollon 9/1911; 
Homo novus [Aleksandr Kugel] in Teatr i iskusstvo 1/14 June 1912. 



AVANT, Special Issue, Vol. IV, No. 3/2013 www.avant.edu.pl/en 
 

81 
 

I remember a circular movement, many figures running round and 
rising high in the air, and from their centre, as from the middle of a 
bright, glittering flower in the wind, a man rising head and shoulders 
above them, pirouetting in the air, resting on the air, a creature who has 
defied gravitation’s laws – Nijinsky! 

Although Fokine and other 'new ballet' choreographers did away with some of 
the geometric rigidity of the 'old ballet', they retained the hierarchy of the 
dancers that emphasised the principals over the ballet 'crowd', the corps de 
ballet (see e.g. Svétlow 1912: 7). Contrary to what is often presented, this is 
true even of the Ballets Russes ensemble pieces like Les Danses Polovtsiennes, 
possibly the biggest success of the 1909 season, starring Adolph Bolm.66 

Like the fact that dance was graceful and harmonious, the manner in which 
dance was set on stage was so self-evident that prior to Nijinsky breaking the 
rules, reviews said very little about choreography: how Fokine created or 
developed the ensemble effects on stage, what were the relationships of 
different dancers (men and women, soloists versus chorists), or how the 
choreographic devices expressed the plot or related to the music. Outside of 
Russia, Fokine was almost never interviewed, the star dancers received all the 
media attention.67 Moreover, in Western reviews, dance was quite secondary 
to the plot, the visual design and the music: descriptions of the actions of even 
the principal dancers are rare. But Nijinsky's Faune shows such a drastic 
change in how dance was discussed that it actually belies the frequently-heard 
claims about the inability of Western critics to write about dance.68  

However, like Jeux, which only had three dancers, Faune was a small work 
where critical attention could focus on detail. Sacre, in contrast, was a massive 
piece, involving most of the dancers of the company and a series of events 
flowing into one another and multiple dances happening simultaneously. 
Hence, the Sacre reviews were rather vague about specific choreographed 
moments outside of a handful of significant instances (notably, the dance of 
the Chosen Maiden in the second act). Instead of a detailed description of 
specific movements or choreographic devices, the texts contain general 
comments on the movement style. Having said this, many critics also noted 
                                                             
66 True ensembles, of course, should not have stars in this manner. See e.g. Gil Blas 20.5.1909; 
Comœdia Illustré 1.6.1909.  

67 For a rare exception, see Gil Blas 4.6.1912 where Fokine discusses period art and costuming as 
his "method" for transferring the story to stage. 

68 E.g. The Times 4.11.1911 said of Nijinsky that "His dancing, too, has new elements in it, 
wonderful, rhythmic patterns of the body which he has not shown us elsewhere." Although this 
was far more than was usually said, nothing followed to tell the reader what these new elements 
of Nijinsky’s dancing actually were. Cf. the detailed description of the line of the nymph's body in 
Henri Bidou's review for le Journal des débats politiques et littéraires 10.6.1912, quoted in Järvinen 
2009: 47. 



A Laboratory of Spring 
 

82 
 

similarities between the three works that can be used to infer other 
similarities on the level of choreography.  

The choreographer of Sacre did not exactly facilitate the formation of this 
critical discourse. Himself a star of unprecedented magnitude, Nijinsky had a 
penchant not to give proper names to the characters in his works.69 When it 
comes to Sacre, he claimed that, 

There are no human beings in it. It is only the incarnation of Nature – 
not of human nature. It will be danced only by the corps de ballet, for it 
is a thing of concrete masses, not of individual effects.70 

In an unprecedented choreographic move Sacre had no stars to dominate the 
attention of the spectator or principals whose story they could follow − none 
of the characters in the first act appeared in the second. This was not 
something designated by the libretto, let alone the programme notes (see 
Théâtre des Champs-Élysées: Saison Russe 2.6.1913), which, in actuality, allow 
for a very traditional ballet about the kind of fanciful peasants that 
Lunacharsky ridiculed in his review.71 This tradition is clearly also what the 
audiences expected, after the previous successes of Ballets Russes "ensemble" 
works like Les Danses Polovtsiennes. Sensibly, in casting the work, Nijinsky 
did not engage the top tier of the Ballets Russes roster of dancers, including 
himself and his partners in Jeux, Tamara Karsavina and Ludmila Schollar. Yet 
the fact that Nijinsky himself did not dance turned out to be a cause for 
further critical displeasure − in L’Eclair (31.5.1913 quoted in Bullard 1971(ii): 
67-68), Paul Souday ended his rant about the ugliness of Sacre with an 
exclamation: “And M. Nijinsky did not even dance!” Similarly, Gustave de 
Pawlowski asked in Comoedia (31.5.1913) whether just one appearance by 
Nijinsky himself would not have brought the ballet back on track. 

Again, the Russian critics, familiar with Petipa's ensemble effects and with the 
nationalist ideas of Russian spiritual community (соборность), saw nothing 
wrong in this emphasis on the crowd. Prince Volkonsky wrote for Apollon 
(6/1913) of how this brought forth the element of rhythm in the choreography: 

 

                                                             
69 Whereas Nijinsky would have danced "Count Albrecht" in Giselle or "Vaiu" in Le Talisman, in his 
four choreographies, the only character that had a proper name was "Till Eulenspiegel" in the 
eponymous ballet of 1916. In practice, this meant most dancers were not individualised in the 
programme notes, which again reduced their claim to stardom. 

70 Pall Mall Gazette 15.2.1913. This sounds curiously similar to the ideas of some of his Russian 
contemporaries: see Douglas 1986: 187. 

71 "знаменитыхъ пейзанъ въ шелковыхъ рубахахъ и плисовыхъ шароварахъ." I.e. "the 
usual peasants in silk shirts and corduroy trousers." Lunacharsky in Teatr i iskusstvo 9./22.6.1913, 
my translation. 



AVANT, Special Issue, Vol. IV, No. 3/2013 www.avant.edu.pl/en 
 

83 
 

 

Надо сказать и то, что исполнено это было восхитительно, – 
ровно, однотонно: двигались не люди, двигалась вся линія, какъ 
нѣчто одно, само по себѣ живое, – человѣческое ожерелье, 
связанное невидимою нитьвю ритма... 

Большое воспитательное значеніе имѣетъ это подтвержденіе 
хористическаго начала въ томъ искусствѣ, которое до сихъ поръ 
было самое ‘солистическое’ изъ всѣхъ. Забвеніе своего ‘я’ – первое 
условіе искусства, и въ этом смыслѣ новое направленіе нельзя не 
привѣтствовать, какъ элементъ художественнаго здоровья.72  

The emphasis, here, on dance as an art of the individual and of the soloist was 
even more accurate in contemporary dance outside of ballet − most of the 
period's famed stars (Letty Lind, Loïe Fuller, Isadora Duncan) danced alone. 

With Sacre, however, this lack of stars drew critical attention to choreographic 
composition. Hence, the critics spoke of how the masses were balanced on 
stage and how they played against and with the music and décor. They 
noticed associations between certain dancers and particular instruments; for 
instance, between the women and the oboes, also evident in Stravinsky's notes 
(1969: 39). Although the dancers would not have been aware of all of these 
correspondences until the final rehearsals in Paris in May 2013,73 their 
execution struck several critics as wonderful. The Times (26.7.1913) admired 
how 

even the colours of the dresses are to some extent reflected in the 
orchestration – as, for instance, in the first scene, when a group of 
maidens in vivid scarlet huddles together to the accompaniment of 
closely-written chords on the trumpets. Movements, too, are mirrored in 
an equally realistic way, when, a little later on, the dancers thin out into 
a straggling line, while the orchestra dwindles to a trill on the flutes; 
then a little tune begins in the woodwind two octaves apart, and two 

                                                             
72 “It must be said that the execution of this was wonderful – steady, monotonous; the people did 
not move, only the lines moved, as if no-one lived alone, on their own – a human necklace tied by 
the invisible string of rhythm... 
The great pedagogic significance [of Sacre] is this strengthening of the choristic foundation in an 
art, which up to now has been the most ‘solistic’ of all. The forgetting of one’s ‘I’ [is] the first 
imperative of art, and in this sense the new trend can only be welcome as an element of artistic 
health.” My translation. 
73 The dancers had first rehearsed on stage 18.5.1913 (after the premiere of Jeux), but the only 
rehearsals of Sacre with the full orchestra took place 26. and 27.5.1913, with the public dress 
rehearsal on 28.5.1913. Although by today's standards this seems like extraordinarily few 
rehearsals, it would have been normal for a touring company like the Ballets Russes, where the 
dancers rehearsed to a piano score over several months - see next fn. 



A Laboratory of Spring 
 

84 
 

groups of three people detach themselves from either end of the line to 
begin a little dance that exactly suits the music. (Similarly, 
Propert 1972: 79) 

This kind of design where synesthesia (the mixing of sensory perceptions) is 
implicit, required an unprecedented amount of forethought on the part of the 
collaborators, complicated by the fact that Nijinsky did not have either the 
orchestration of the music or Roerich's designs at his disposal during most of 
the rehearsal process − the designer had sent the designs to the composer 
who, despite several requests, did not forward them to the choreographer.74 
The orchestration also proved to differ in several places from the piano 
score.75 However, Stravinsky and Nijinsky must have discussed the orchestral 
colour for the effect to have been visible for the contemporary spectators to 
the extent that it seems to have been; and Nijinsky may have focused on it 
with the dancers as well. Despite his later claims, it seems that Stravinsky was 
quite willing to listen to the choreographer, although he was reluctant to live 
up to his promise to return to help with the rehearsals − and when he did – it 
proved somewhat counterproductive.76 

In addition to the associations between groups of dancers and the music, the 
critics also commented on how the choreography utilised counterpoint, 
setting one group against another − one moving lightly, one heavily, the Elders 
moving twice as slow as the Adolescents, and so on.77 In an attempt to 

                                                             
74 Writing to Roerich on 1./14.12.1912 (in Stravinsky 1997(i): 383-384), the composer scolded the 
designer for sending him the designs he had told him to send to Nijinsky. The régisseur of the 
company, Sergei Grigoriev, gave the lack of costume designs as the excuse for not beginning the 
rehearsals in a letter to Stravinsky 5./18.12.1912 (in Stravinsky 1997(i): 390). Diaghilev 
telegrammed Stravinsky 20.12.1912/2.1.1913 (Stravinsky 1997(i): 398) urging him to send the 
designs, but the costume designs for the second act were not delivered to Nijinsky until the end of 
March at the earliest, as on 10./23.3.1913 (in Stravinsky 1997(ii): 42) Diaghilev again told 
Stravinsky to send Roerich’s books and designs. As Jane Pritchard and Lynn Garafola pointed out 
to me in conversation (20.4.2013), Nijinsky also could not have held on to the designs, as they had 
to return to St. Petersburg for Ivan Caffi's firm to actually make the costumes by May. The odyssey 
of the costume designs belies the reconstructors' extravagant use of the designs for the 
choreographic patterns: Hodson 1986: especially 77n31; Hodson 1996: especially 106, 116. 

75 “[Nijinsky] showed me certain passages in the piano score that are not in agreement with the 
orchestra score, and he told me that the orchestra score is correct.” Monteux to Stravinsky 
22.2.1913 in Stravinsky 1984: 51-52. 

76 Stravinsky was in London in February 1913 and certainly conducted one rehearsal with the 
dancers in Paris 13.5.1913 (Stravinsky & Craft 1978: 95, 99), but the latter may not be the occasion 
when the composer managed to frighten the dancers, as Rambert (1983: 58-59) recalled. 
77 E.g. The Times 26.7.1913 wrote of the "curious mouse-like shufflings of the old woman against 
the rapid steps of the adolescents" (the 'reminiscences' of Beaumont 1951: 72 largely rest on this 
review). Similarly, Kirstein paraphrasing Rambert’s letter in Stravinsky & Craft 1978: 513; and 
Propert 1972: 81, which Hodson 1987: 60 erroneously claims to be an observation “at the time of 
the première”. 



AVANT, Special Issue, Vol. IV, No. 3/2013 www.avant.edu.pl/en 
 

85 
 

describe the work for American readers, Carl Van Vechten (1915: 107) pointed 
to how some individuals counterpointed group movements and how these 
related to the orchestral score: 

At the beginning of the ballet the adolescents pound the earth with their 
feet, while a little old woman runs in and out between their legs, to the 
reiterated beat of a chord of F flat, A flat, C flat, F flat; G, B flat, D flat, 
and E flat, all in the bass (begin from below and read in order), while an 
occasional flute or a piccolo screams its way in high treble. 

When re-reading his Sacre notes in 1967, Stravinsky himself was surprised by: 

the principal choreographic accents and phrase units, which were 
seldom coterminous with the accents and phrases of the music. In 
addition, I cancelled the metrical units of the music on the assumption 
that to count beats instead of measures of irregular lengths would 
approximate ballet routine [-.-] The dance is almost always in 
counterpoint to the music.78  

Here, Stravinsky shows an understanding of ballet routine − in 1913, he would 
have had experience of writing two other ballets − and directly contradicts his 
earlier reminiscences on Nijinsky's choreography. His cancellation of the 
metrical units created choreographic phrases that were (usually) easier for 
the dancers to remember. For example, “count the next six measures in 6/4”.79 

This concern over how dancing keeps pace with the music is even more 
striking when one remembers that in the scenario, the only distinct 
choreographic movement is at the end of the first act: "Chacun piétine la Terre 
avec extase." (Théâtre des Champs-Élysées: Saison Russe 2.6.1913.) Certainly, 
this stomping − both at the beginning and at the end of the first act − did 
receive more than its share in the reviews. It is connected to the third of the 
movement qualities, repetition, a quality shared by both the choreography 
and Stravinsky's musical score. 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                             
78 Stravinsky 1969: 35, see also 37. According to Hodson in Les Printemps du Sacre 1993, Nijinsky 
set five rhythmic elements over the two in Stravinsky’s score, but actually it was Stravinsky who 
had marked the jumps for the dancers in the score – Stravinsky 1969: 36. 

79 Stravinsky 1969: 37, also 35, 37 on the surprising complexity. Stravinsky brought the piano 
score to Nijinsky in Berlin 27.11.1912. However, Nijinsky alludes to Sacre already in an interview 
to L’Intransigeant 13.6.1912. 



A Laboratory of Spring 
 

86 
 

Beating and Falling 

By all accounts, following the lyrical introduction, the first scene of the ballet 
shocked, because the dancers kept jumping in place, stomping the ground 
and, as Van Vechten notes above, kept repeating these movements. Indignant, 
Adolph Boschot (in L’Echo de Paris quoted Bullard 1971(ii): 12) wrote of how 
the dancers 

paw the ground, they stamp, they stamp, they stamp, they stamp and 
they stamp.... Flash! They break into two groups and salute each other. 
And they stamp, and they stamp, and they stamp.... Flash! A little old 
lady falls on her head and shows us her third petticoat. And they stamp, 
they stamp.... 

The recurrence of the stamping motion, together with the musical recurrences 
in the score that accompanied them, created a strong sense of the work 'going 
nowhere' − for example, Gustave de Pawlowski complained (in Comœdia 
31.5.1913) of having to suffer through two acts of primitives doing nothing. 

It is tempting to see the process of how repetition becomes a non-event as 
parallel to European contemporary dance choreography half a century later − 
in other words, with dance that has rejected spectacle and hence required an 
ontological re-positioning for the audience (see Burt 2008) – however, doing so 
would easily lead us to read our attitudes into the responses of 1913. Such 
fallacious post hoc arguments aside, new critical dance and dance scholarship 
have drawn my attention to aspects of past choreography that cannot be fully 
addressed in this article. As André Lepecki (2006: esp. 63) has pointed out, 
repetition is a kind of a fall into temporality because it is "reiterating what is 
forever not quite the same". This "triggers the possibility for the secretion of a 
temporality which allows the body to appear under a different regime of 
attention and stand on a different, less firm (ontological) ground." Although 
Lepecki is discussing the still act of contemporary dance, I would say that the 
critical reception of Sacre − specifically, the need to deny the work the 
ontological status of dance − amply proves the sudden epistemological 
uncertainty created by and in the choreographed repetition. 

Furthemore, the idea that repetition deducts from rather than adds to 
meaning cut likens Sacre to Nijinsky's earlier works, specifically his interest in 
circular, undramatic storylines that downgraded the importance of narrative 
to ballet as an art form:  

Un sujet de ballet, reprit alors Nijinsky, doit être ‘nul’ ou connu de tout le 
monde. On ne réfléchit pas plus au cours d’un ballet que devant un 
tableau ou durant une symphonie.80 

                                                             
80 Nijinsky according to Cahusac in Le Figaro 14.5.1913. The idea is curiously similar to what 
Cocteau later wrote to Stravinsky 4.2.1914 (in Stravinsky 1982: 74): "The dance must not express 



AVANT, Special Issue, Vol. IV, No. 3/2013 www.avant.edu.pl/en 
 

87 
 

Again, this is not to say Nijinsky's aim would have been a modernist 
abstraction − all of his choreographies had a theme if not exactly a 
conventional plot, and Sacre more so than Faune or Jeux − but they became 
more like contemporary free-form dance in their narration. The 
aforementioned replacement of 'natural' gestures with stylised movements 
required that the audience worked out their own interpretation of the events 
rather than assumed the kind of straightforward illusionistic mimesis of 
naturalist theatre for which Nijinsky's predecessor, Fokine, had striven.81 
Similarly, as I will shortly demonstrate, in Nijinsky's works, choreographic 
compositional devices, such as unisono or tableau, became part of the 
narration. 

However, the dancers' stomping on stage is significant also because it went 
against the presumed quality of good dancing as silent and effortless: Nijinsky 
was famous for the noiseless landings of his leaps, which had given a quality 
of ethereal lightness to his dance.82 In contrast, the dancers of Sacre beat out a 
complex rhythm that complemented the regular pulse of the orchestra. For 
example, in the Auguries of Spring, bar [13], when the music beat out tempo 
giusto 4/8, Stravinsky marked accents for the jumps of the young men as [3]: 
on the 2nd and 4th, [4]: none, [5]: 2nd, [6]: 1st, [7]: 1st, [8]: 2nd bar.83 This 
thumping was read as "noise" − it was not the sound of one individual 
occasionally landing with a thud, it was an intentional and prolonged use of a 
physical action that was considered dangerous: several articles commented on 
how Sacre caused headaches, “shock[ed] the ear and assault[ed] the nerves”84, 
and The Daily Telegraph (26.7.1913) even claimed that Maria Piltz had been 
forbidden by her doctor to perform the Chosen One. Upon retrospect, it is 
remarkable that the dancers would agree to subject themselves to what would 
have seemed like outrageous demands of the young choreographer. 

 

 
                                                                                                                                                             
anything. The [dancer’s] body must arouse itself in a burst, becoming another instrument in the 
orchestra." 

81 One of the few to note the significance of specific mimed gestures was Louis Vuillemin in 
Comœdia 31.5.1913. 

82 E.g. Levinson 1982: 87; Bourman 1938: 10 on Nijinsky landing softly; also The Athenaeum 
5.6.1912. 

83 Stravinsky 1969: 36. The section is reproduced in Hodson 1996: 3 who gives all the dancers 
different movements for this section − something not corroborated by contemporary sources 
which, if anything, stress the unisono. 

84 The Fortnightly Review September 1913; similarly, Victor Valter quoted in Taruskin 1996: 1026. 
The reminiscences of Beaumont 1951: 75; and the conductor Monteux (quoted in Schouvaloff 
1997: 293) noted the work caused headaches. 



A Laboratory of Spring 
 

88 
 

Few of the critics were as flexible in their attitudes. A massive work lasting 
three quarters of an hour, Sacre clearly was meant to overwhelm the 
spectator, an experience Émile Vuillermoz (in S.I.M. Revue musicale June 1913) 
summarised as: 

vous êtes lié à cet orchestre comme Mazeppa à la croupe de son cheval 
et vous êtes bien forcé de galoper, bon gré mal gré, par dessus les monts 
et les plaines et d'aller où il lui plaît de vous conduire. 

Hurled along by the centrifugal force of the work, the poor critic is 
recluntantly hurled along by the centrifugal force onstage − the image of the 
cyclone in the orchestra emphasises his reluctance − Vuillermoz is an 
unwilling victim; he does not wish to lose himself in the work; he resists and 
fears its power. In part, his reaction may be attributed to the fear of the 
(racial, primitive) other or the fear of the crowd, likened to the idea of 
threatening otherness in much of the social theory of the period (see e.g. 
Ledger & Luckhurst 2000: 55-66). But like the Chosen Maiden, trapped by the 
unseen gods of her tribe, the off-stage victim also struggles in vain. 

The last of the movement qualities listed above relates to the prominence of 
falling in the choreography. Like asymmetry and arhythmy, stumbling and 
falling were read as mistakes, as failures in and to dance.85 In the Stravinsky 
and Rambert notes on Sacre, different kinds of falling occur in Sacre: for 
example, the Old Woman falls at the end of the Augurs of Spring [22] “with 
her little feet in the air”;86 and during the The Games of Two Cities in [58] the 
three maidens throw themselves on the ground. In the second act, the 
Maidens prepare the ground for the sacrifice by falling down in [121] and 
[127]; and the Chosen One gets chosen because she stumbles and falls down 
on the 3rd and 2nd bar before [201].87 These falls signify differently but all 
direct attention to the heaviness of the dancers' bodies, in stark contrast to 
how, in contemporary discourse on dance, “[d]ancing is not, on the other 
hand, a matter of leaping in the air, but a matter of annihilating weight and 
giving one the impression of spirit.” (The Bellman 29.1.1916.) Falling, in other 
words, was corporeal, drawing attention to the weight and to the bodies 
conditioned by gravity. 

                                                             
85 Hodson 1987: 58 notes this. However, her argumentation is simplistic − the significance of 
falling depends on the context. See Lepecki 2006: esp. 63. 

86 Hodson 1996: 19 quoting the Rambert score. This is apparently the moment Boschot (quoted 
above) describes. 

87 Stravinsky 1969: 36-38. Stravinsky is obviously not clear how long it will take the dancers to 
execute the dance – he writes “if the abduction is concluded here” (emphasis added) in bars 4-5 of 
[47]; Fink 1999: esp. 325 on Stravinsky’s variable tempi; Hodson 1996: 57-62, also 135, 148-153 on 
the other falls. 



AVANT, Special Issue, Vol. IV, No. 3/2013 www.avant.edu.pl/en 
 

89 
 

Geoffrey Whitworth (1913: 96) chose a scientific parallel to describe this 
quality in Sacre, which he deemed 

a studied demonstration of the attractive force of the earth and of the 
triumph of gravity. I have heard that if we were transported all at once 
to a planet like Jupiter, much greater in bulk than our earth, the sense of 
bodily weight would be so increased that we should find it difficult to 
walk upright. Such apparently is the feeling of the people in Le Sacre du 
Printemps. The earth seems like an enormous magnet which continually 
drags them downwards to itself and even leaps are purely ritual. 

Whitworth's use of the word 'ritual' to signify 'for the sake of convention or 
habit' again draws attention to the multivalence absent from 'ritualistic' 
readings of this choreography (such as Hodson’s). More importantly, besides 
his interesting reference to physics, which recalls other scientific metaphors 
used to describe Sacre,88 Whitworth's description points to the novelty of a 
dance that did not pretend to lightness.  

In contemporary aesthetics, showing the actual effort of dance was unseemly: 
virtuosic movements such as an extended series of pirouettes (the 32 fouettés 
en tournant for a ballerina) or difficult leaps (such as tours en l'air for male 
dancers) had to be executed with both precision and apparent ease (again, a 
feature associated with Nijinsky's dancing).89 Virtuosity, of course, 
emphasised individual skill, and unsurprisingly, the only part acknowledged 
as virtuosic in Sacre was the solo of the Chosen Maiden in the second act, 
where she was set in the middle of circles − first of maidens dressed in 
costumes identical to hers, then, during her sacrificial dance, of (the spirits of) 
the Ancestors (see pastels by Valentine Gross in Kahane 2000: 82-83). Her final 
dance, the only solo of the work, received a great deal of attention from 
reviewers, and even those disliking Nijinsky's choreography praised the 
efforts of Maria Piltz.90 However, since the Chosen Maiden was separated 
from an identically dressed group only through her (choreographed) action, 
critics professed uncertainty as to what led to this dance (e.g. Johnson 1913: 
204). In other words, the essentially choreographic selection of the Chosen 
Maiden may have led to the impression that her choosing was random, which 

                                                             
88 E.g. Vuillermoz in S.I.M. Revue musicale June 1913 spoke of the electrocution of the dancers; 
Rivière in La Nouvelle revue française November 1913 on Sacre as a biological ballet. 
89 See e.g. Comœdia 20 May 1909: "les difficultés techniques n’étaient que jeux pour lui"; Comœdia 
15 June 1910; Flitch 1912: 155; Whitworth 1913: 25-6; Van Vechten 1915: 77-8. However, although 
new ballet choreographers tended to dislike virtuosity, Nijinsky ended Fokine’s choreography in 
Schéhérazade (1910) by spinning on his head: e.g. Beaumont 1951: 36. 
90 See Jullien in Le Journal des débats politiques et littéraires 8.6.1913; The Times 26.7.1913; Johnson 
1913: 204-206; Levinson in Rech 3./16.6.1913; Svetlov in Peterburgskaia gazeta 23.5./5.6.1913. 



A Laboratory of Spring 
 

90 
 

would have made her death seem senseless – an interpretation that 
contributed to how Sacre became symbolic of the First World War. 

 

Rehearsing the Dance 

With the kinds of movement qualities listed above, it is no wonder Nijinsky 
had difficulties with the dancers, even if they did not outright refuse to 
perform in the work. With his first choreographic composition, Faune (which 
had premiered in May, 1912), Nijinsky had already struggled to get the Ballets 
Russes dancers to understand what he required of them. Perhaps noticing that 
using ballet vocabulary caused dancers to fall back on what they already 
knew, he started describing the poses in Russian (see Nijinsky's notes in 
Debussy & Nijinsky s.a.). His notations show extreme precision in co-
ordinating dance with musical rhythm,91 an exponentially more difficult issue 
with the rhythmically complex score of Sacre. From contemporary accounts, it 
is clear that dancers and audience members alike seemed to expect dance to 
relate to the musical score in what can only be called simplistic manner: 
accents of danced movement corresponded with musical accents much like in 
social dances; accelerando or crescendo were reflected in identical changes in 
both the pace of movements on stage and the dancers' expansive use of the 
stage space. In one interview, Lydia Sokolova (1998: 146) expressed the view 
that her fellow dancers equated music with melody. “They played to sounds, 
to melodies,” and added that her earlier musical studies helped her greatly to 
come to terms with Nijinsky’s choreographic requirements. 

The solution to the choreographer's dilemma was to hire someone to teach the 
complexities of musical rhythm to the dancers, and the obvious person to 
provide such a teacher was the Swiss composer and pedagogue, Émile Jaques-
Dalcroze (1865-1950). Nijinsky and Diaghilev went to visit Dalcroze's school in 
Hellerau near Dresden (reported in Comœdia 18.4.1912), possibly because 
Prince Volkonsky ([1914], 23-35) was a great advocate of Dalcroze's 
eurhythmics in Russia. Since this visit predates the premiere of Nijinsky's first 
choreography, Faune, it has become a common misperception that Dalcroze's 
method was crucial to Nijinsky's understanding of choreography.92  

                                                             
91 Guest & Jeschke 1991: especially 20, 169-170 on timing. In a book edited by Richard Buckle, 
Sokolova 1960: 40 portrays Nijinsky as insane but nonetheless claimed Faune was a difficult work 
and cites the choreographer's instructions as “You must try to walk between the bars of the music 
and sense the rhythm which is implied.” However, in an interview with John Drummond for his 
1968 Diaghilev films for the BBC, Sokolova (1998: 146) recalled that "once you mastered it, and 
you could hear yourself, or feel yourself dancing in sound, it was the most delightful thing to 
dance in that you could possibly imagine." 

92 E.g. Barker 1982: 58 believes this so firmly she thinks Nijinsky’s going against Dalcrozian 
principles was due to the fact that he composed the work to the piano score. However, her 



AVANT, Special Issue, Vol. IV, No. 3/2013 www.avant.edu.pl/en 
 

91 
 

Late in 1912, when the rehearsals of Sacre were due to begin, Diaghilev hired 
a Dalcroze student, Marie Rambert (Miriam Ramberg), as Nijinsky's 
choreographic assistant. Rambert was to teach musical rhythm and timing to 
the dancers so that they would understand Nijinsky's choreographic 
instructions − not to teach Dalcroze to Nijinsky. The fact that the 
choreographer thought the professional ballet dancers of the Ballets Russes 
would need classes in this subject indicates that he doubted their abilities to 
cope with what he planned for the choreography of a score of which only a 
piano rendering existed at this stage. Unfortunately, the dancers were so 
opposed to Rambert's classes that they were quickly discontinued.93 Rambert 
also later claimed that Dalcroze was of no use to her with the music of 
Stravinsky, and (rather modestly) said she contributed little to Nijinsky's 
choreographic composition.94 

This misperception of Nijinsky's choreography as "Dalcrozian" also owes 
something to a letter Claude Debussy wrote to Robert Godet, a French 
advocate of Dalcroze's system: 

Permettez-moi de comprendre parmi ces derniers [événements bien 
inutiles], la représentation de Jeux, où le génie pervers de Nijinsky s’est 
ingénié à de spéciales mathématiques! Cet homme additionne les triples 
croches avec ses pieds, fait la preuve avec ses bras, puis subitement 
frappé d’hémiplégie, il regarde passer la musique d’un œil mauvais. Il 
paraît que cela s’appelle la “stylisation du geste”... C’est vilain! C’est 
même dalcrozien, car je considère monsieur Dalcroze comme un des 
pires ennemis de la musique! Et vous supposez ce que sa méthode peut 
faire de ravages dans l’âme de ce jeune sauvage qu’est Nijinsky!95 

In what is clearly a tongue-in-cheek manner, Debussy attacked Nijinsky for 
doing a disservice to his own music − Nijinsky's choreography to Debussy's 
Jeux that premiered only a fortnight before Sacre. However, the composer 

                                                                                                                                                             
apparent source, Valentine Gross in Comoedia Illustré 5.6.1913, does not actually say this. 
Similarly, Bullard 1971(i): 34-35; Pasler 1981: 178 cf. 194; and even Odom 1992: 75 attribute too 
much to Dalcroze and Rambert; cf. Buckle 1993: 317-318; and next two fn. 

93 Rambert 1983: 55-57; Rambert 1975. The company régisseur Sergei Grigoriev 1953: 81 claims it 
was his idea that Rambert’s classes were combined with Nijinsky’s rehearsals to save time – the 
dancers called them “arithmetic classes”. Nijinsky's sister Bronislava Nijinska (1992: 450-457) 
professed her utter disdain of Dalcroze and of Rambert. 

94 Rambert quoted in Hodson 1985b: 37-38: “But Dalcroze’s method, which is terribly simple, 
didn’t help because Stravinsky didn’t care a hoot if one bar was three-four and the next seven-
eight, then from three-four to five-three. I mean it was absolutely impossible.” Rambert told 
Buckle 1998: 327 that her only contribution to the choreography was to once suggest to Nijinsky 
that he would use several small circles instead of one big one. 

95 Debussy’s letter to Robert Godet quoted Nectoux 1992: 62-63; also Odom 1992: 76. 



A Laboratory of Spring 
 

92 
 

certainly misinterpreted Nijinsky’s use of stillness as Dalcrozian – nothing 
would have been more contradictory to Dalcroze’s thinking than stopping still 
when the music suggested movement!  

Based on contemporary reviews and illustrations, the choreography of Sacre 
did retain some of the uniformity and emphasis on group movements that 
characterised the Dalcroze system at this time, even if Dalcroze favoured 
much more symmetrical and harmonious groupings than are evident in the 
surviving drawings of Sacre.96 Needless to say, Dalcroze intensely disliked 
Nijinsky’s Faune, and complained that it lacked "continuity of movement and 
of plastic phrasing"97 – qualities notably missing from Sacre as well. What 
Nijinsky’s contemporaries usually meant by a 'Dalcrozian influence' was a 
schematic correspondence of danced rhythm and musical rhythm: “if real 
tears had been forthcoming one is sure that they, too, would have fallen in 
semiquavers.” (Propert 1972: 78 on Jeux.) Nijinsky's sister, Bronislava Nijinska, 
who was originally meant to dance the Chosen Maiden, recalled 

one particular incident during the early rehearsals in Monte Carlo. 
Nijinsky demonstrated a pas-mouvement in the choreography to the 
musical count of 5/4. During his huge leap he counted 5 (3+2). On count 
1, high in the air, he bent one leg at the knee and stretched his right arm 
above his head, on count 2 he bent his body towards the left, on count 3 
he bent his body towards the right, then on count 1, still high in the air 
he stretched his body upwards again, and then finally came down 
lowering his arm on count 2, graphically rendering each note of the 
uneven measure.98 

To clarify the connection between music and choreography, Nijinsky counted 
beats out aloud to the dancers and he kept this up even during the 
performances.99 According to Sokolova (1960: 42) and Piltz (in Krasovskaya 
                                                             
96 See Gross 1971: 132-141; Gross in Hodson 1996: passim, esp. 2, 8, 66; The Daily Mail 12.7.1913 on 
"twenty-four dances performed by twenty-four dancers to twenty-four different tunes played 
simultaneously"; Rivière in La Nouvelle revue française November 1913 on how the music and the 
choreography were both fragmented, their units distinctively free of each other, colliding, 
meeting, passing each other. 

97 Jaques-Dalcroze 1921: 267-268. In 1913, Dalcroze invited Stravinsky to visit his school and 
praised his music in the same letter where he scolded the Russian dancers who "do not yet 
understand music" and Nijinsky who "dances next to and against music". Dalcroze's letter to 
Stravinsky 7.1.[1913] in Stravinsky 1984, 77-79. 

98 Nijinska 1992: 460; cf. Hodson in Hodson in Les Printemps du Sacre. Hodson 1993: 168 used this 
for Act II, Scene 5, [144], dance of the Chosen Maiden where the musical count is 4/16 and 5/16, 
but Nijinska 1992: 460-461 clearly implies it was a pas in Act I: “I had been coming to Vaslav’s 
rehearsals in Monte Carlo, even though he was working with the artists of the first scene”. 

99 Nijinska 1992: 450; Rambert 1983: 64; also Cocteau 1918: 66; Stravinsky 1975: 45. However, 
Nijinsky certainly could not have shouted cues to all the dancers. 



AVANT, Special Issue, Vol. IV, No. 3/2013 www.avant.edu.pl/en 
 

93 
 

1979: 268), some of the dancers were close to panicking in the orchestra 
rehearsals when they heard what seemed like a different piece of music.  

Although Nijinska's description of the pas-mouvement sounds a little like a 
Dalcroze exercise, as Selma Odom notes, relatively few critics mentioned 
Dalcroze in the reviews.100 Even Prince Volkonsky did not claim Nijinsky was 
in any way emulating Dalcroze or that the end result looked 'Dalcrozian' − 
after all, Dalcroze himself was still modifying and refining his pedagogical 
ideas and would do so for years to come. 

Я видѣлъ незабываемую репетицію. Нижинскій проходилъ сцену 
съ одной изъ танцовщицъ, которая должна была замѣнить 
другую. Репетиція въ залѣ, - они двое и акомпаніаторъ, больше 
никого. Это была восхитительная работа переложенія музыки 
въ движеніе. Тактъ за тактомъ, нота за нотой, воспринимались 
ухомъ, усваивались сознаніемъ, отбивались въ ладоши и потомъ 
воспроизводились въ танцовально-мимическомъ движеніи. 
Только у Далькроза видалъ я такое тѣсное, до полной сліянности 
тѣсное, сочетаніе музыки и движенія. Какъ эта маленькая 
сценка, так былъ разученъ весь двухактный балетъ 
Стравинскаго «Священная Весна». Что меня поразило въ этомъ 
балетѣ, это, рядомъ съ ритмичностью задуманныхъ 
балетмейстеромъ картинъ, удивительная ритмичность 
исполненія. Кордебалетъ, который м о ж е т ъ  э т о , 
представляетъ собой изумительный ритмическій матеріалъ. И 
вотъ, когда видишь этотъ поразительный матеріалъ и при 
этомъ вспоминаешь нѣкоторыя наши балетныя постановки, 
спрашиваешь себя, какъ же это возможно, чтобы такой 
кордебалетъ осуществлялъ такія антиритмичныя картины, 
какія мы иногда видали? И приходится заключить, что дѣло не 
въ кордебалетѣ, а въ балетмейстерахъ.101 

                                                             
100 Odom 1992: 75. One example is Vuillermoz in S.I.M. Revue musicale June 1913. Dalcroze 
advertised profusely in this paper. 

101 "I saw an unforgettable rehearsal. Nijinsky went on stage with one of the dancers, who had to 
replace an other [dancer]. Rehearsal in the hall - only the two [of them] and the accompanist, no 
others. This was charming work of arranging music with movement. Bar by bar, note by note, 
receiving by ear, absorbing understanding, taken from his hands and then reproduced in danc-
ing-miming movement. Only in Dalcroze have I seen such strictness, such complete fusion, com-
bination of music and movement. Like this little scene, so all [dancers] would learn Stravinsky's 
two-act ballet "Sacred Spring". What struck me in this ballet, next to the rhythm of [stage] pictures 
conceived by the ballet master, it is their amazing rhythmic execution. A corps de ballet that can 
[do this] is capable of marvellous rhythmic execution. And so, when you see this amazing execu-
tion whilst recalling some of our ballet productions, you ask yourself, how is it possible that such 
a corps de ballet realised such anti-rhythmic [stage] pictures that we have sometimes seen? One 
must conclude that what is the matter [there] is not in the corps de ballet but in the ballet master." 



A Laboratory of Spring 
 

94 
 

In a description reminiscent of Nijinska's recollection of the rehearsals, 
Volkonsky mentioned his hero, Dalcroze, as the only one with a similar 
demand for precision. Praising the company, he thought that Nijinsky had 
whipped the Ballets Russes into shape, showing the dancers to their 
advantage. Volkonsky thus positioned himself against the 'new ballet' of 
Fokine in the contemporary Russian debate on the future of the art form. 

 What has confused some researchers is that in contemporary texts, the terms 
‘eurhythmics’ and 'rhythmic gymnastics' that Dalcroze used to describe his 
system did not automatically connote the work of this particular theorist − 
eurhythmy simply means harmonious composition (as in Ferdinand Hodler's 
1895 painting Eurhythmy, see Levinson 1982: 58). At the time, many theatrical 
practitioners were interested in rhythmic movement and gymnastics as 
means to self-improvement and creation of staged effects − from theatrical 
forms in the Delsarte tradition like those developed by Isadora's brother 
Raymond Duncan to Vsevolod Meyerhold's biomechanics. The Sketch 
(23.7.1913) associated Sacre with "Swedish-exercise-like movements", Teatr i 
iskusstvo with Meyerhold,102 and Nijinsky alludes to the work of Raymond 
Duncan in one interview.103 Although this is not to say Nijinsky did not take 
something from Dalcroze as well, it is obvious that he, like choreographers 
before and since, also had other sources for the ideas he wanted to stage − 
down to the wooden duck that the conductor Edwin Evans had given the 
choreographer (Pritchard 2010, 80-81 quoting Evans). In other words, to 
exaggerate the significance of Dalcroze is to downplay the originality of the 
choreography of Sacre and to simplify contemporary reactions to it. 
Therefore, it is good to keep in mind Volkonsky's point that, despite grumbling 
about hard work, the dancers managed to master a difficult and unfamiliar 
dance idiom and perform it to the hoots and whistles of an audience like the 
true professionals they were. 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                             
Apollon 6/1913, my translation, emphasis in the original. Similarly, when The Times 26.7.1913 
writes that Nijinsky "joins hands with such workers as M. Jaques-Dalcroze", the critic continues to 
speak of Nijinsky's theories on ballet. 

102 N.N. in Teatr i iskusstvo 26.5./8.6.1913. Minsky in Utro Rossii 24.5./6.6.1912 had already made 
the same connection. 

103 In L’Intransigeant 13.6.1912. Minsky in Utro Rossii 24.5./6.6.1912 had also made this 
connection, which may imply that Nijinsky had read his review. 



AVANT, Special Issue, Vol. IV, No. 3/2013 www.avant.edu.pl/en 
 

95 
 

The Still Tableau 

Besides movement qualities, the choreographic composition of Sacre flaunted 
convention in other ways. The most notable of these was doing away with the 
principal means for making sense of dance narrative, the tableau (or stage 
picture). The libretto of Sacre and the programme notes let the audience 
expect a set of pictures from pagan Russia (“Tableaux de la Russie Païenne”), 
but the stage action did not fulfill these expectations. As one contemporary 
critic complained, "The incidents [--] cannot be called dramatic, for they follow 
each other without much feeling for rational sequence or climax."104 This is 
one reason why critics deemed the authors incapable of communicating their 
ideas to the audience,105 but one that has rarely been addressed in research 
on the work. 

Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs have convincingly argued that in contemporary 
theatre and early cinema, the purpose of the tableaux was to divide the scene 
into easily manageable parts: they punctuated the action, stressed and/or 
prolonged a dramatic situation, and sometimes also gave allegorical or 
abstract significance to the events (emphasising the morality of the play, for 
example). The tableaux were marked by a change of scenery, and/or musical 
cue, and/or choreographic action, usually an exit/entrance pause that 
preceded the new scene (Brewster-Jacobs 1997: esp. 8-13, 29, 35-38.) As with 
Nijinsky's earlier choreographies, Sacre failed to follow this self-evident 
theatrical convention, and to provide the audience with the necessary cues to 
'read' a change of tableau into the stage action. Stravinsky, too, was very 
proud of his smooth musical junctures between the different pieces of the 
libretto (Stravinsky to Roerich 13./26.9.1911 in Stravinsky 1997(i): 300). 

As with Faune and Jeux, Nijinsky misplaced the expected choreographed 
stillness used for marking tableaux. The misplaced stillness 'read' wrong, 
which broke the ‘flow’ so integral to the meaning of dance for contemporary 
audiences. However, it also created choreographed counterpoints on stage by, 
for example, placing one still group against another moving,106 a still 
individual amidst a moving group,107 or a still group with one individual 

                                                             
104 The Times 26.7.1913. Also Taruskin 1995: 18-19 notes the Russian critics wrote of the music as 
immobility, disunity and disjunction. 
105 Bullard 1971(i): 205. This relates to the argument above about the presumed racial difference 
between the Russians and the French. 
106 E.g. in bar [135], according to Stravinsky 1969: 42; for 15 bars in the Cortège du Sage [67], 
according to Rambert quoted in Hodson 1996: 98. 
107 E.g. the Old Woman at [17] bar 3, falls on her knees amidst the young men (Hodson 1996: 11) 
and is apparently still until [19] where she “moves her head” (op.cit.: 13) just to fall in [22] 
(op.cit.: 19). 



A Laboratory of Spring 
 

96 
 

moving.108 In the first act, stillness is marked at least for 2 bars of [22]; for 2 
bars before [41]; in 4th, 3rd, 2nd and 1st bars before [47]; in the 5th, 2nd and 1st bar 
before [50]; and 1 bar before [72]. Similarly, in the second act, 1 bar before 
[101]; 1 bar before [102]; and 1 bar before [117].109 Of these, the last one in the 
first act and the second to last one in the second are traditional tableau 
pauses, occurring just before the Dance of the Earth and at the moment of the 
choosing of the Chosen Maiden – the culminating points, respectively, of each 
act. Contrary to Hodson’s interpretation (based on the disparities between the 
Rambert and Stravinsky notes), it seems likely that at some of these points the 
entire ensemble stopped moving. Such a sudden, complete stillness onstage is 
a striking device that would also emphasise the stop-and-start beat of the 
orchestra. As Pasler (1981: 200) notes, the orchestra paused at [71] to allow the 
dancers to run and surround the Sage, contrasting rapid movement with 
silence, followed by stillness as the music resumed. 

However, the most striking, unconventional use of stillness in the 
choreography precedes the solo of the Chosen Maiden. During the Danse 
Sacrale, precisely when the music seems to indicate rapid movement, this 
soloist stands absolutely still amidst other moving dancers.110 According to 
the notes printed in the Stravinsky score,111 her immobility lasts from [103] to 
[142]: “Jusqu’à la danse sacrale l’élue reste immobile.” (Printed on the musical 
score Hodson 1996: 137 uses.) Although Nijinsky by no means invented this 
device – it had even been used in cinema (Brewster & Jacobs 1997: esp. 51-52) 
– it was the direct opposite to the way things had been done − traditionally, 
the corps de ballet stood still, or at least moved to the sides, when the 
principals came on stage. 

Moreover, the unprecedented length of this stillness – if the Stravinsky score is 
to be believed, nearly a fifth of the entire ballet – created a very specific 
experience for the audience. Some critics' remarks reveal how this stillness 
extended the temporal experience of the audience: “it was oddly painful to 

                                                             
108 Apparently, the ancestors stand watching the Chosen One, and move when she tries to stop her 
dance from [159] to 2nd bar before [161]: “from here the Chosen One again dances”, and they 
move to catch her when she falls down dead in [201]. Stravinsky 1969: 42-43; also Krasovskaia 
1971(i): 440-442 quoting Nijinska’s recollection. 
109 Stravinsky 1969: 36-41; cf. Hodson 1996: 19 writes the men do not move in [22], 47 notes five 
bars of stillness and 65-66 writes no-one except the three tall women move in [49] (as Rambert 
says they do). Also Pasler 1981: 106-206 on the close association between the musical organisation 
and the choreography. 
110 Fink 1999: 338. Several reviews noted this moment, usually to disparage Nijinsky's 
choreographic choice: Gaston Carraud in La Liberté 31.5.1913; Adolphe Boschot in L’Echo de Paris 
30.5.1913 quoted in Bullard 1971(ii): 10-15; La France 4.6.1913 quoted in op.cit. (ii): 94-99. 
111 If this was in any manner similar to how Nijinsky's notes were transcribed on a piano score of 
Jeux, these were quite precise stage instructions. See Debussy & Nijinsky s.a. cf. Debussy 1912. 



AVANT, Special Issue, Vol. IV, No. 3/2013 www.avant.edu.pl/en 
 

97 
 

observe [her] standing in complete rigidity during (it seemed) ten minutes, in 
the trance which precedes her frenzied dance.”112 Besides bringing in the 
critic's subjective, emotional reaction to the choreographed action (largely 
absent from reviews of Ballets Russes productions prior to Nijinsky's works), 
such remarks point to how Sacre created a sense of the work going nowhere, 
an inertia that the audiences read in conflicting ways.113 As Taruskin (1995: 
18) notes, Russian critics actually discussed Stravinsky's score as stillness − an 
impression that emerges from repetition. 

Nijinsky's use of stillness in the choreography also explains the frequent 
complaints in contemporary press about the jerks and disturbing 
fragmentation of the action. As with Faune and Jeux, Sacre provoked 
complaints about excessive theorisation and 'cerebralism'. For Gaston 
Carraud (La Liberté 31.5.1913), Nijinsky 

s'agit, sous prétexte de "stylisation", comme disent les gens bien 
informés, de prendre pour modèle, non pas nature, ce qui serait trop 
simple, mais les interprétations que l'art a déjà fournies de la nature; 
c'est-à-dire de donner l'impression du mouvement par l'immobilité. 

Although meant as an admonishment, this is a striking claim: the impression 
of movement achieved through immobility. The critic may have thought of the 
contrasts between movement of certain figures and stillness of others, or the 
displaced stillness of the tableaux, but nevertheless he managed to point out 
that the still figure was not without movement but rather, as H.T.P[arker] 
wrote in his long interview with Nijinsky (Boston Evening Transcript 
9.11.1916), stillness "intensified projection by subtler and keener means than 
action". 

Just as Stravinsky’s music accumulated towards the end of the first act, so did 
the choreography, until it created “a rhythm of unwearying persistence that 
throbs through all the festival, so that at last the whole broad earth seems to 
be throbbing, throbbing to the beat of it” (Whitworth 1913: 92). A similar 
accumulation took place in the second act (Taruskin 1996: 957-962), which 
culminated in the death of the only soloist. This accumulation, predicated on 
repetition, was yet another reversal of what and how dance signified: in 
contemporary discourse, dance was about life, not about death,114 and the 
ending of Sacre lacked the kind of apotheosis that audiences expected of a 
ballet − an affective justification of the Maiden's sacrifice through some kind 

                                                             
112 The Daily Mail 12.7.1913. Similarly, Svetlov in Peterburgskaia gazeta 23.5./5.6.1913; 
Chantavoine in L'Excelsior 30.5.1913. 
113 See Johnson 1913: 206 on how the work does not bore; cf. Levinson in Rech 3./16.6.1913 on the 
work as boring. Also Pasler 1981, 313 on Debussy similarly using static moments and repetition in 
Jeux. 
114 For example, Flitch 1912: 24; Suarès in La Nouvelle revue française 1 August 1912. 



A Laboratory of Spring 
 

98 
 

of a resurrection or supernatural intervention (Acocella & Garafola & Greene 
1992: 68-69; Scholl 1994: 73). Here, the sacrifice seemed senseless: even the 
ancestors in bear-skins could be understood as actors, as human beings 
dressed in ceremonial garb. The ballet ended in a pessimistic tone, 
emphasised by the lack of harmonic development in the music.115 

In later interpretations, the death of the maiden became the symbolic death of 
a generation on the battlefields of the First World War − in the words of Jean 
Cocteau (1918: 63), writing in 1918, “J’y distingue les prodromes de la guerre”. 
In 1913, when fears of Russians as warmongers were on the rise,116 the 
association was rather with the foreignness of the aesthetic of Nijinsky, whom 
Alfred Capus (in Le Figaro 2.6.1913) jokingly called “sorte d’Attila de la danse”, 
a leader of the invading Russian horde. For more xenophobic critics, such 
invasion was distinctly unwelcome (e.g. Jean Perros in La Critique 
Independante 15.6.1913). 

After the war, Sacre became a symbol of the lost ability of the avant-garde to 
shock the audience into rioting: a work about youth, spring, and violent 
renewal rejected by the conservative audience and (felicitously) lost so 
quickly that no-one could ever dispute its shocking novelty (e.g. Vaudoyer 
1929: 710; Propert 1972: 81). However, in the process, certain aspects of Sacre 
had to be suppressed. The nature of Sacre as a stage spectacle, programmatic 
music fused with danced performance, became cumbersome as modernism 
moved towards formalism and its demands of 'purity' of art forms. Stravinsky 
did everything in his power to dissociate his music from Nijinsky’s 
choreography, and consequently, the ‘craziness’ in the reception of the work 
was ascribed to the choreographer's mental illness.117 Similarly, the ideas of 
abstraction as the highest goal for modernist art, the messianic Russian 
nationalism of Sacre, and its narrative structure had to be erased from the 
equation. The easiest way to do this was by forgetting the choreography. 

 

                                                             
115 E.g. Touchard in La Nouvelle revue 1.7.1913 commented he would have preferred the 
development. 

116 See e.g. Kern 2000: 261, 280-284 on this believed to be the last moment to stop Slavic invasion. 

117 Acocella & Garafola & Greene 1992: 69 on how Nijinsky’s insanity became associated with the 
loss of the ballet; similarly, Hodson 1996: x-xii (however, op.cit., xix she predetermines madness 
as Nijinsky's destiny). The first negative comments on the Nijinsky choreography appeared in 
1920 in Les Deux Sacres, attributed to Stravinsky but in reality written by Michel Georges-Michel. 
Quoted in Lesure 1980: 53; see also Bullard 1971(i): 32-33; Stravinsky & Craft 1978: 511-512. 
Nijinsky’s madness both confirmed the destructive effect of the ballet and showed how the genius 
predicted the universal human destiny at the risk of his own life. Thus, for the defenders of 
Nijinsky, Sacre became important because it was the epitome of his martyrdom, a lost 
masterpiece, the transcendental truth of which went unnoticed. 



AVANT, Special Issue, Vol. IV, No. 3/2013 www.avant.edu.pl/en 
 

99 
 

Some Concluding Remarks 

Setting aside the riotous behaviour of the Parisian audience,118 Nijinsky’s 
Sacre provoked critics to reflect on choreographic elements, such as how the 
dances counterpointed the music, or how the groups were balanced on stage. 
There was no pre-existing vocabulary for the movements, no soloists to focus 
on, and the narrative made no sense. On the other hand, Nijinsky's previous 
works had already utilised a similar stylisation of gestures, a downplaying of 
virtuosity, an emphasis on structure and contrasts between stillness and 
movement, giving the works a signature style attributed to the new author-
figure of dance, the choreographer.  

Despite numerous hostile commentaries, in 1913, Sacre was clearly seen as a 
major work − even many of the negative reviews asserted this. But with two 
very young authors − Stravinsky and Nijinsky − the work was also seen as 
important more for the potential it showed than as a finished piece in and of 
itself. In some ways, of Nijinsky's 1912-1913 choreographies, the pagan 
primitives of Sacre were the easiest to accept, and the reputation of the work 
might have been very different had it remained in the repertory of the Ballets 
Russes even for one more season. Yet, as I hope to have shown, the 
disappearance of the choreography from the repertory or the changing 
meanings it has attained over time (and in various reiterations) in the 
repertoire do not preclude an analysis of what remains of it in the archive, 
even if the tendency to treat a much later invention (the reconstruction) as 
this archive is a fallacy that reduces the potential for such reimagining of 
choreographic practice. 

By not dancing in his third choreography Nijinsky established himself in the 
traditional authorial role reserved for the composer of music − a creator not 
present on stage. Although it would have been impossible for him to assume 
this role without first having become famous not just as a dancer but as a 
dancing genius, Nijinsky's choreographic practice was changing how dance as 
an art form was defined on the fundamental levels of ontology − what was 
dance and who was its author − in ways that would have long-lasting 
repercussions for rehearsal methods and evaluation of works in the repertory 
(his demands of accuracy) as well as the understanding of 'a work' as an 
abstraction that could be placed in an archive (his interest in notation) and 
resurrected at will. It is these repercussions, this coming together of the 
archive and the repertoire, that dance artists have struggled with far more 

                                                             
118 However, it is dangerous to read too much into the audience behaviour: not only were 
theatrical riots quite common in Paris (e.g. La Nouvelle revue française June 1912 review of Faune 
and Regnault's Salomé was titled "Deux récentes scandales"), but as Svetlov notes in 
Peterburgskaia gazeta 23.5./5.6.1913, the protests began before the audience could have acquired 
a clear understanding of the work. 



A Laboratory of Spring 
 

100 
 

than the reputation of one man or works that were quickly dropped from 
active repertory. 

Of course, new epistemes do not replace old ones overnight nor can one 
author-figure affect an epistemic change. Currently, contemporary dance 
artists seem to be moving away from this kind of idealist notion of 
choreography and engaging with the specificity of dancers and audiences 
alike.119 It is in this sense in particular that the reconstructors have done a 
disservice to Sacre: by fixing it in terms of (ambiguous) authorial intention 
and (dubious) authenticity. The subsequent canonisation of the 1913 Sacre 
lends political and ethical impetus to contesting the now-hegemonic Hodson 
choreography and its (limited, c. 1987) understanding of 'dance'. Since many 
of the innovations in Nijinsky's choreographies were simply dismantling 
established conventions and thus gradually expanding the possibilities of 
staged movement, perhaps the most important legacy of his works lies in the 
manner they questioned the rules that were seen as ontological qualities of 
dance. This question of what, in fact, is dancing, offers countless possibilities 
of re-imagining dance by re-examining, critically, that which we have been 
told is true, universal and self-evident on and off stage. 

 

 

Works cited 

PRIMARY SOURCES 

Periodicals 

Apollon 1911, 1913 

The Athenaeum 1912 

The Bellman 1916 

Boston Evening Transcript 1916 

The Bystander 1913  

Comœdia 1909, 1910, 1912, 1913 

Comœdia Illustré 1909, 1913 

Le Courrier Musical 1912, 1913 

La Critique Independante 1913 

The Daily Mail 1913 
                                                             
119 See e.g. Solomon 2011; and Launay 2012 on how Nijinsky's choreographies figure in the 
repertoire as memories of citations where the imagined original is transformed in performance. 
As with the movement qualities of Sacre, this is a topic that merits an article of its own. 



AVANT, Special Issue, Vol. IV, No. 3/2013 www.avant.edu.pl/en 
 

101 
 

The Daily Telegraph 1913 

The Dancing Times 1913  

L'Excelsior 1913  

Le Figaro 1909, 1913 

The Fortnightly Review 1913 

Gil Blas 1909, 1912 

La Grande revue 1913 

The Graphic 1913 

L’Intransigeant 1912 

Journal des débats politiques et littéraires 1912, 1913 

The Lady 1911 

La Liberté 1913 

The Literary Digest 1912, 1913 

Mercure de France 1913 

The Nation 1913 

The New York Herald 1916  

Nineteenth Century and After 1913 

La Nouvelle revue 1913  

La Nouvelle revue française 1912, 1913  

Pall Mall Gazette 1913 

Peterburgskaia gazeta 1913 

Rech 1912, 1913 

S.I.M. Revue musicale 1913 

Sketch 1913 

Teatr i iskusstvo 1912, 1913 

Le Temps 1913 

The Times 1911, 1913 

Utro Rossii 1912, 1913 

 

 

 

 



A Laboratory of Spring 
 

102 
 

Archival materials 

New York Public Library Dance Collection: 

Rambert, M. 1975. Interview with J. Gruen 30.7.1974, corrected by M. Rambert 
27.1.1975. 

Bibliothèque nationale de France: 

Théâtre des Champs-Élysées: Saison Russe 2.6.1913. Programme booklet. Source: 
gallica.bnf.fr, 7.5.2013. 
 

International Music Score Library Project: 

Debussy, C. & Nijinsky, V. s.a. Jeux. Manuscript piano score from the Yale University 
Serge Lifar collection. Source: http://www.imslp.org/wiki/Jeux(Debussy,_Claude) score 
#03661, 16.6.2007. 

Debussy, C. 1912. Jeux: Poème dansé de Nijinsky. Piano score. Paris: A. Durand et fils. 
Source: http://www.imslp.org/wiki/Jeux(Debussy,_Claude) score #03662, 16.6.2007. 

 

Contemporary books 

Caffin, C. & Caffin, C. H. 1912. Dancing And Dancers Of Today: The Modern Revival Of 
Dancing As An Art. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company. 

Duncan, I. 1977. The Art of the Dance. Ed. S. Cheney. New York: Theatre Arts Books 
(1928). 

Jaques-Dalcroze, É. 1921. Rhythm, Music and Education. Transl. H. F. Rubinstein. New 
York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. 

Flitch, J. E. C. (M.A.). 1912. Modern dancing and dancers. Philadelphia and London: J.B. 
Lippincott Co. and Grant Richards Ltd. 

Johnson, A.E. 1913. The Russian Ballet. London: Constable & Co. 

Kinney, T. & Kinney, M. W. s.a. The Dance: Its place in art and life. Rev. ed. New York: 
F.A. Stokes Company [1st ed. 1914]. 

St.-Johnston, R. 1906. A History of Dancing. London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 
& Co.  

Svétlow, V. 1912. Le Ballet Contemporain. Ouvrage édité avec la collaboration de L. 
Bakst. Transl. M.-D. Calvocoressi. Paris & St-Pétersburg: M. de Brunoff & Société R. 
Golicke et A. Willborg. 

Tolstoy, L. 1904. What is Art? and Essays on Art. Transl. A. Maude. New York: Funk & 
Wagnalls Co. [1899, Russian 1897]. 

Van Vechten, C. 1915. Music After the Great War and Other Studies. New York: G. 
Schirmer. 

Volkonsky, S. [1914]. Otkliki teatra. Petrograd: Tipografiya Sirius. 

Whitworth, G. 1913. The Art of Nijinsky. London: Chatto & Windus. 



AVANT, Special Issue, Vol. IV, No. 3/2013 www.avant.edu.pl/en 
 

103 
 

Republications and collections of archival materials 

Bullard, T. C. 1971. The First Performance of Igor Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps. PhD 
thesis, vol. 2 & 3, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester. 

Gross, V. 1971. Nijinsky on Stage. Ed. R. Buckle. London: Studio Vista. 

Lesure, F. 1980. Igor Stravinsky – Le Sacre du Printemps – Dossier de presse. Geneva: 
Minkoff. 

Levinson, A. 1982. Ballet Old and New. Transl. S. C. Summer. New York: Dance 
Horizons (Russian 1918). 

Nijinsky, V. 1999. The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky. [Unexpurgated edition.] Transl. K. 
Fitzlyon, ed. J. Acocella. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 

Stravinsky, I. 1982. Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, vol. 1. Transl. and ed. R. Craft. 
London, Boston: Faber and Faber. 

Stravinsky, I. 1984. Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, vol. 2. Transl. and ed. R. Craft. 
London, Boston: Faber and Faber. 

Stravinsky, I. 1969. The Rite of Spring – Le Sacre du Printemps: Sketches 1911-1913. 
Facsimile. s.l. Bosey & Hawkes. 

Stravinsky, I. F. 1997. Perepiska s russkimi korrespondentami: Materialy k biografii. Vol. 
I: 1882-1912; Vol. II: 1913-1922. Ed. and annotated by V.P. Varunts. Moskva: 
Kompozitor. 

Zilberstein, I.S. & Samkov, V.A. 1982. Sergei Diagilev i russkoe iskusstvo. Moskva: 
Iskusstvo. 

 

Reminiscences 

Beaumont, C. W. 1951. The Diaghilev Ballet in London: A Personal Record. 3rd ed. 
London: Adam and Charles Black (1940). 

Bourman, A. 1938. The Tragedy of Nijinsky. London: Robert Hale (1937). 

Cocteau, J. 1918. Le Coq et L’Arlequin: Notes autour de la musique. Paris: Editions de la 
Sirène. 

Grigoriev, S. 1953. The Diaghilev Ballet 1909-1929. Transl. and ed. Vera Bowen. New 
York: Dance Horizons. 

Fokine, M. 1961. Memoirs of a Ballet Master. Transl. V. Fokine, ed. A. Chujoy. Boston 
and Toronto: Little, Brown and Co. 

Karsavina, T. 1981. Theatre Street or the Reminescences of Tamara Karsavina. London: 
Dance Books (1930). 

Morrell, O. 1963. Ottoline: The Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Ed. R. Gathone-Hardy. 
London: Faber & Faber. 

Nijinska, B. 1992. Early Memoirs. Transl. and ed. I. Nijinska and J. Rawlinson. Durham 
and London: Duke University Press (1981). 



A Laboratory of Spring 
 

104 
 

Propert, W. A. 1972. The Russian Ballet in Western Europe, 1909-1920. New York: 
Benjamin Blom (1921). 

Rambert, M. 1983. Quicksilver: The Autobiography of Marie Rambert. London: 
Macmillan (1972). 

Sert, M. 1953. Misia and the Muses. New York: The John Day Co. (French 1952). 

Sokolova, L. 1960. Dancing for Diaghilev: The Memoirs of Lydia Sokolova. Ed. R. Buckle. 
London: John Murray. 

Sokolova, L. 1998. Interview with John Drummond. In J. Drummond, Speaking of 
Diaghilev: 135-161. London and Boston: Faber and Faber (1997). 

Stravinsky, I. 1975. An Autobiography. London: Calder & Boyars (1936, French 1935).  

Vaudoyer, J.-L. 1929. Impressions et souvenirs. L'Art Vivant 15 September: 709-710. 

 

 

SECONDARY SOURCES 

Unpublished material 

Bullard, T. C. 1971. The First Performance of Igor Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps. PhD 
thesis, vol. 1, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester. 

Hodson, M. K. 1985. Nijinsky’s New Dance: Rediscovery of Ritual Design in Sacre du 
Printemps. PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley. 

Hoogen, M. M. 1997. Igor Stravinsky, Nikolai Roerich, and the Healing Power of 
Paganism: The Rite of Spring as Ecstatic Ritual of Renewal for the Twentieth Century. 
PhD thesis, University of Washington. 

Pasler, J. C. 1981. Debussy, Stravinsky, and the Ballets Russes: The Emergence of a New 
Musical Logic. PhD thesis, University of Chicago. 

 

Video material 

L’Après-midi d’un Faune. 1991. Performed at the Juilliard Theater, New York, 
11.12.1989. Dir. M. Topaz and N. S. Jordan; reconstruction by A. H. Guest. Attachment 
for Choreography and dance 1:3. 

Les Printemps du Sacre. 1993. Dir. J. Malaterre; Script B. Hernandez & J. Malaterre. La 
Sept/Arte – Telmondis, in association with Télévision Suisse Romande, Centre National 
de la Cinématographie, Ministère de la Culture of France. YLE 1, 20.3.1994. 

 

 

 

 



AVANT, Special Issue, Vol. IV, No. 3/2013 www.avant.edu.pl/en 
 

105 
 

Research literature 

Acocella, J. 1991. Nijinsky/Nijinska Revivals: The Rite Stuff. Art in America October: 
128-137, 167, 169, 171.  

Acocella, J. & Garafola, L. & Greene, J. 1992. The Rite of Spring Considered as a 
Nineteenth-Century Ballet. Ballet Review 20(2): 68-71. 

Barker, B. 1982. Nijinsky’s Jeux. The Drama Review 2(1): 51-60. 

Berliner, B. A. 2002. Ambivalent Desire: The Exotic Black Other in Jazz-Age France. 
University of Massachusetts Press: Amherst, MA. 

Brewster, B. & Jacobs, L. 1997. Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early 
Feature Film. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press. 

Buckland, T. J. 2001/2002. 'Th'Owd Pagan Dance': Ritual, Enchantment, and an 
Enduring Intellectual Paradigm. Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human 
Movement 11(4) & 12(1): 415-452. 

Buckle, R. 1993. Diaghilev. Rev. ed. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson (1979). 

Buckle, R. 1998. Nijinsky. Rev. ed. London: Phoenix Giant (1971). 

Burt, R. 1998. Re-presentations of re-presentations. Dance Theatre Journal 14(2): 30-33. 

Burt, R. 2008. Revisiting ‘No To Spectacle’: Self Unfinished and Véronique Doisneau. 
Forum Modernes Theater 23(1): 49–59. 

Carter, A. 1998. The Case for Preservation. Dance Theatre Journal 14(2): 26-29. 

Carter, A. 2011. Constructing and Contesting the Natural in British Theatre Dance. In A. 
Carter & R. Fensham , ed., Dancing Naturally: Nature, Neo-Classicism and Modernity 
in Early Twentieth-Century Dance: 16-30. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave 
Macmillan. 

Douglas, C. 1986. Beyond Reason: Malevich, Matiushin, and Their Circles. In M. 
Tuchman , ed.: The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985: 195-199. New 
York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Abbeville Press. 

Fink, R. 1999. 'Rigoroso (=126)': The Rite of Spring and the Forging of a Modernist 
Performing Style. Journal of the American Musicological Society 52(2): 299-362. 

Franko, M. 1989. Repeatability, Reconstruction and Beyond. Theatre Journal, 41(1): 56-
74. 

Garafola, L. 1992. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. New York and London: Oxford University 
Press (1989). 

Gerhard, R. 2000. A Very Different Faune. Dance Theatre Journal, 16(1): 30-33. 

Guest, A. H. & Jeschke, C. 1991. Nijinsky’s Faune Restored: A Study of Vaslav Nijinsky’s 
1915 Dance Score and his Dance Notation System. Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach. 

Guest, A. H. 1992. Nijinsky’s Own Faune. The Dancing Times, January & February: 318-
319, 424-426. 

Hatt, M. 1999. Physical culture: the male nude and sculpture in late Victorian Britain. 



A Laboratory of Spring 
 

106 
 

In E. Prettejohn , ed., After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian 
England: 240-255. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 

Hodson, M. 1985b. Ritual Design in the New Dance: Nijinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps. 
Dance Research 3(2): 35-45. 

Hodson, M. 1986. Ritual Design in the New Dance: Nijinsky’s Choreographic Method. 
Dance Research 4(1): 63-77. 

Hodson, M. 1987. Sacre: Searching for Nijinsky’s Chosen One. Ballet Review 15(3): 53-
66. 

Hodson, M. 1996. Nijinsky’s Crime Against Grace: Reconstruction Score of the Original 
Choreography for Le Sacre du Printemps. Dance and Music Series 8. Stuyvesant, NY: 
Pendragon Press. 

Järvinen, H. 2009. Dancing without Space: On Nijinsky's L'Après-midi d'un Faune (1912) 
Dance Research 27(1): 28-64. 

Järvinen, H. 2012. 'Dancing Back to Arcady': On Representations of Early Twentieth-
Century Modern Dance. In S. Ravn & L. Rouhiainen , ed., Dance Spaces: Practices of 
Movement: 57-77. Odense: University of Southern Denmark Press. 

Järvinen, H. 2013. 'Great Horizons Flooded with the Alien Light of the Sun’: Le Sacre du 
Printemps in the Russian Context. Dance Research 31(1): 1-28. 

Jeschke, C. 1990. ‘A Simple and Logical Means.’ Nijinsky, the Spirit of Times and Faun. 
In J.-M. Nectoux , ed., Nijinsky: Prélude à L’Après-midi d’un Faune: 97-122. London: 
Thames and Hudson (French 1989). 

Jordan, S. 2000. Moving Music: Dialogues with Music in Twentieth-Century Ballet. 
London: Dance Books. 

Kahane, M. , ed.. 2000. Nijinsky, 1889-1950. Musée d’Orsay 23 October 2000-18 
February 2001. Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux. 

Kern, S. 2000. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard 
University Press (1983). 

Kirstein, L. 1975. Nijinsky Dancing. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 

Koritz, A. 1994. Dancing the Orient for England: Maud Allan's The Vision of Salome. 
Theatre Journal 46(1): 63-78. 

Koselleck, R. 2004. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Transl. K. Tribe. 
New York: Columbia University Press (German 1979). 

Krasovskaia, V. 1971. Ruskii baletnii teatr nachala XX veka. Vol. I: Khoreografy; Vol. II 
Tanchovschiki. Leningrad: Iskusstvo. 

Krasovskaya, V. 1979. Nijinsky. Transl. and annotated by J. E. Bowlt. New York: Dance 
Horizons (Russian 1974). 

Launay, I. 2003. Communauté et articulations, à propos de la recreation du Sacre du 
Printemps de V. Nijinsky. In Claire Rousier , ed., Être ensemble: Figures de la 
communauté en danse depuis le XXe siècle: 65-87. Paris: Centre national de la danse. 



AVANT, Special Issue, Vol. IV, No. 3/2013 www.avant.edu.pl/en 
 

107 
 

Launay, I. 2012. Citational Poetics in Dance: ... of a faun (fragments) by the Albrecht 
Knust Quartet, before and after 2000. Dance Research Journal 44(2): 49-69. 

Ledger, S. & Luckhurst, R. 2000. The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c. 1880-
1900. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 

Lepecki, A. 2006. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. London 
and New York: Routledge. 

McClary, S. 1995. Music, the Pythagoreans, and the Body. In S. Leigh Foster , ed., 
Choreographing History: 82-104. Indiana University Press: Bloomington and 
Indianapolis. 

Mikkeli, H. 1999. Euroopan idea: Eurooppa-aatteen ja eurooppalaisuuden pitkä historia. 
Helsinki: SHS.  

Monni, K. 2007. Tanssiesteettinen perintö ja Deborah Hayn radikaali taide: ontologisen 
eron pohdintaa. In P. Houni, J. Laakkonen, H. Reitala & L. Rouhiainen , ed., Liikkeitä 
näyttämöllä: 36-61. Näyttämö & Tutkimus 2. Helsinki: Teatterintutkimuksen seura. 

Nectoux, J.-M. 1992. Debussy et Nijinsky. In F. Stanciu-Reiss & J.-M. Pourvoyeur , ed., 
Écrits sur Nijinsky: 57-65. Paris: Chiron. 

Nelson, K. 1984. Bringing Fokine to Light. Dance Research Journal 16(2): 3-12. 

Odom, S. L. 1992. Nijinsky à Hellerau. In F. Stanciu-Reiss & J.-M. Pourvoyeur , ed., 
Écrits sur Nijinsky: 67-77. Paris: Chiron.  

Ostwald, P. 1991. Vaslav Nijinsky: A Leap into Madness. London: Robson Books. 

Pritchard, J. 2010. Creating Productions. In J. Pritchard , ed., Diaghilev and the Golden 
Age of the Ballets Russes, 1909-1929: 71-88, 213. London: V&A Publishing. 

Rhodes, C. 1994. Primitivism and Modern Art. London: Thames & Hudson. 

Salmond, W. R. 1996. Arts and Crafts in Late Imperial Russia: Reviving the Kustar Art 
Industries, 1870-1917. USA: Cambridge University Press. 

Scholl, T. 1994. From Petipa to Balanchine: Classical Revival and the Modernisation of 
Ballet. London and New York: Routledge. 

Schouvaloff, A. 1997. The Art of Ballets Russes: The Serge Lifar Collection of Theater 
Designs, Costumes, and Paintings at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, 
Connecticut. New Haven and London: Yale University Press and the Wadsworth 
Atheneum. 

Smith, M. 2000. The Earliest Giselle? A Preliminary Report on a St. Petersburg 
Manuscript. Dance Chronicle 32(1): 29-48. 

Solomon, N. 2011. Conducting Movement: Xavier Le Roy and the Amplification of Le 
Sacre du Printemps. Dance Research Journal 43(1): 65-80. 

Stravinsky, V. & Craft, R. 1978. Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents. New York: Simon 
and Schuster. 

Taruskin, R. 1995. A Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rite of Spring, the Tradition of 
the New, and 'The Music Itself'. Modernism/Modernity 2(1): 1-26. 



A Laboratory of Spring 
 

108 
 

Taruskin, R. 1996. Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works 
through Mavra. 2 vols. USA: Oxford University Press, University of California Press. 

Taylor, D. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the 
Americas. Durham: Duke University Press.  

Vihavainen, T. 1999. From Globalism in Confinement to Egocentrism Unbound. The 
Spheres of the Russian Intelligentsia. In J. Smith , ed., Beyond the Limits: The 
Concept of Space in Russian History and Culture: 167-178. Helsinki: SHS. 

Wiley, R. J. 1985. Tchaikovsky’s Ballets: Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker. 
Oxford: Clarendon Press. 

Williams, R. C. 1999. Russia Imagined: Art, Culture, and National Identity, 1840-1995. 
New York: Peter Lang (©1997).